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COPYRIGHr DEPOSm 



K. 




Charles Lamb 

After the painting by William Hazlitt 



f^m^'n €n^li^\) Clas^sftcs; 



THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 



BY 
CHARLES LAMB 



SELECTED AND EDITED 

BY 

H. E. COBLENTZ 

SOUTH DIVISION HIGH SCHOOL, MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN 



BOSTON, U.S.A. 

D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHEES 

1909 






LIBRAHYof CONGRtS,^ 
Tv/o Cooies Received 

MAR 5 1^09 

CopiTiiiiU fcntry 
CLASS 4L. ^^c, fio, 



Copyright, 1909, 
By D. C. Heath & Co. 



EDITOR'S PREFACE 

Portia's comment on Falconbridge, " How oddly he is 
suited ! I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose 
in France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behavior every- 
where," might be deftly shifted by a critic to suit this prepa- 
ration of Lamb's Essays of Elia. The editor has, indeed, and 
herewith frankly acknowledges the fact, laid heavy hands on 
much material gathered by others far more able than he. No 
one can edit Lamb's Essays without following the master 
editors, — Lucas, Ainger, MacDonald, — and the present editor 
has gladly followed in the tracks of these giants, though, to 
quote Lowell, "with legs painfully short." But he trusts that 
while 

" His office than the reaper's may be meaner, 
But still some praise is due unto the gleaner." 

For he has garnered the material with only one point in mind 
— to make a student's edition, suitable and pleasing to those 
who may thus be led to a keener and sweeter appreciation of 
what constitutes real humor. If he has succeeded in doing 
this, he feels that the motley in the editor's work will not be 
much in evidence. 

H. E. C. 



lU 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Biographical Outline of the Life of Charles Lamb . vii 

A Selected List op Books relating to Lamb . . xii 

Lamb's Personal Traits xiii 

THE ESSAYS OF ELIA (Selected) 

First Series 

The South-Sea House 1 

Oxford in the Vacation . 9 

Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago .... 17 

The Two Races of Men 31 

New Year's Eve . . . 37 

Mrs. Battle's Opinions on "Whist 44 

A Chapter on Ears . . .51 

A Quakers' Meeting . . *" 67 

Imperfect Sympathies 63 

Witches and Other Night Fears . . . . . . 71 

Valentine's Day . . . 78 

My Relations 82 

Mackery End, in Hertfordshire 89 

The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple 94 

Grace before Meat 106 

Dream-Children : A Reverie 114 

Distant Correspondents ' . 118 

The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers 124 

A Dissertation upon Roast Pig 132 

The Last Essays of Elia 

Preface to the Last Essays . . . . . . .141 

Blakesmoor in H shire ....... 144 

V 



VI 



CONTENTS 



Poor Relations 

Stage Illusion 

Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading 

The Old Margate Hoy . 

Sanity of True Genius 

Captain Jackson .... 

The Superannuated Man 

Barbara S .... 



Rejoicings upon the New Year's Coming of Age 
Old China . . . . . 
Popular Fallacies. 

iii. That a Man must not Laugh at his own Jest 
V. That the Poor copy the Vices of the Rich 

vi. That Enough is as good as a Feast 

ix. That the Worst Puns are the Best 

xi. That we must not look a Gift Horse in the Mouth 

xii. That Home is Home though it is never so Homely 
xiv. That we should rise with the Lark 

XV. That we should lie down with the Lamb 

Critical and Explanatory Notes 
Explanatory Index . . . . . 
Suggestions and Questions for Study 
Questions and Topics por Review 



PAGB 

150 
157 
161 
167 
176 
179 
184 
192 
197 
203 

209 
210 
212 
212 
215 
217 
222 
224 

227 
255 
308 
318 



BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE OF THE 
LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB 



1775. Charles Lamb was born in London, in Crown Office Row, 
Feb. 10. in the Temple. Of the seven children in the Lamb family, 
three survived their early childhood — Charles, and Mary, ten 
years older than he, and John, twelve years older. 

1781. Charles and Mary Lamb attended William Bird's school in. 
Fetter Lane. " I am sure that neither my sister nor myself 
brought any [language] out of it but a little of our native 
English." 

1782. He obtained a presentation to a scholarship at Christ's Hos- 
pital, where he remained for seven years. Here he met 
Coleridge, who was to be his lifelong friend. Lamb was a 
fair student, acquiring a good knowledge of Latin and attain- 
ing the rank of deputy-Grecian — the second highest rank in 
the school. 

1789. He secured a clerkship in the South-Sea House, where his 
brother John was already employed. 

1796. He published four sonnets in a volume of Poems by S. T. 
Coleridge. "The effusions signed C. L.," says Coleridge in 
the preface to the book, " were written by Mr. Charles Lamb 
of the India House. Independently of the signature, their 
superior merit would have sufficiently distinguished them." 
Of these sonnets one was on Mrs. Siddons, one was " written 
at midnight by the sea-side after a voyage," and two were 
on the writer's love for Ann Simmons, the mysterious Alice 

W n, of the Essays. According to Lamb himself this love 

affair was the cause of his mind failing about this time. To 
use his own characteristic words in a letter to Coleridge, 
" The six weeks that finished last year and began this, your 
humble servant spent agreeably in a madhouse at Hoxton." 
Happily, Lamb never again suffered an attack of insanity. 
Mary Lamb, however, was never free from occasional attacks 
of the family curse. In September of this year, Mary, while 
vii 



Vlll INTRODUCTION 

in a violent frenzy brought on by the family cares and by too 
close application to needle-work, killed her mother. Lamb's 
letter to Coleridge, written September 27th, telling about the 
affair, is one of the most pathetic and forlorn letters ever 
written. Lamb bound himself to a perpetual guardianship 
of his sister, and on this condition she was released. She 
suffered many similar attacks of insanity during her long 
life, but never again committed any disastrous deed. 

1797. Charles and Mary Lamb began their life of " dual loneliness." 
A second edition of Poems by S. T. Coleridge, to which are 
now added Poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd was 
published. Lamb's contribution to the volume was fifteen 
sonnets and occasional verses, best characterized by the term 
" plaintive." He visited Coleridge at Nether Stowey, where 
he met Wordsworth. 

1798. He published a pathetic story entitled A Tale of Rosamund 
Gray, a " miniature romance." His best-known poem, " The 
Old Familiar Faces," was published in this year. 

1799. Lamb met Thomas Manning, a Cambridge mathematician 
and orientalist, who was a man of fine intellect and subtle 
humor, — such a man as befitted Lamb for companionship 
and correspondence. Lamb described him as the most 
"wonderful man" he had ever met. 

1800. Early in this year Lamb and his sister removed from their 
Queen Street lodgings to Chapel Street, Pentonville. In the 
spring Mary fell ill again. Lamb wrote, " Mary got better 
again, but her constantly being liable to these attacks is 
dreadful ; nor is it the least of our evils that her case and all 
our story is so well known around us. We are in a manner 
marked." About this time Lamb began to write paragraphs 
and trifles for the newspapers. 

1801. Lamb removed to No. 16 Mitre Court Buildings, the Temple. 

1802. He published a five-act drama in blank verse entitled John 
Woodvil. This play had been submitted, previous to its pub- 
lication, to John Kemble, then manager of Drury Lane Theatre, 
who declined to produce it on the stage. Although the play 
has some masterly lines in it, it is, nevertheless, crude in 
structure and in characterization. With his sister, Lamb 
spent a holiday at Keswick, Coleridge's home. 

1803. Lamb wrote one of his most beautiful poems, "Hester," in 
memory of Hester Savory, a Quaker girl whom he had often 



BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE IX 

met in his walks about Pentonville. Though he had never 
spoken to her, he had great admiration for her evident sweet- 
ness and goodness, so much admiration, indeed, that one may 
almost believe that Lamb was in love with her. 

1804. Lamb met William Hazlitt, who painted Lamb's portrait, 
beiug at that time as much of a painter as a critic. The two 
men were different in temperament and in their intellectual 
bias, but were, none the less, good friends. De Quincey and 
Lamb met at the India House office late in this year, or pos- 
sibly early in the following year. 

1805. He made his first literary venture for children — a little book 
of rhymes and pictures entitled The King and Queen of 
Hearts. 

1806. Mr. H., a farce by Lamb, was produced by the proprietors 
of Drury Lane. It was a failure. " The curtain fell amid a 
storm of hisses, in which Lamb is said to have taken a con- 
spicuous share " (Ainger) . The Tales from Shakespeare was 
begun. Mary wrote at this time, " You should like to see 
us, as we often sit writing at one table (but not on one cushion 
sitting), like Hermia and Helena, in the Midsummer Night's 
Dream, ; or rather like an old Darby and Joan, I taking snuff, 
and he groaning all the while, and saying he can make noth- 
ing of it, which he always says till he has finished, and then 
he finds out he has made something of it." 

1807. Tales from Shakespeare "by Charles Lamb " was published. 
For some reason, now unknown, Mary Lamb's name was 
omitted on the title-page, although she had paraphrased the 
comedies. Lamb always maintained that her work was the 
better. Lamb next set to work on The Adventures of Ulysses, 
based on Chapman's translation of the Odyssey. " Chapman 
is divine, and my abridgment has not quite emptied him of 
his divinity." 

1808. The Adventures of Ulysses was published. A far more im- 
portant work. Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who 
Lived about the Time of Shakespeare, was also published. 
This book laid the foundation of Lamb's reputation as a 
critic, as a student of the drama, and as a great prose writer. 
Mrs. Leicester's School (dated 1809), by both Charles and 
Mary, was published. Of the ten stories in the book, Lamb 
wrote three. 

1809. The Lambs removed to No. 34 Southampton Buildings, Chan- 
cery Lane, thence to No. 4 Inner Temple Lane. Poetry for 
Children, the joint work of Charles and Mary, was published. 



X INTEODUCTIOX 

1810. Lamb visited Hazlitt at Winterslow. Leigh Hunt projected 
a new quai'terly magazine, the Reflector, "to be written 
mainly by old Christ's Hospitallers, of whom Lamb was not 
least important." Two of Lamb's best critical essays, those 
upon Hogarth and Shakespeare's tragedies, were published 
in the Reflector — which lived through only four numbers. 
The essays named were not published until 1811. 

1811-1816. Eventless years. The literary unproductiveness of this 
period was probably due to Lamb's close confinement and 
overwork at the India House. In 1815, Lamb's salary rose 
suddenly from " about £240 to £480, whence it was to mount 
steadily to £700 in 1821, and to £730 in his last year of office " 
(Lucas). It was probably in 3815 that Charles and Mary 
Lamb again visited Mackery End, in Hertfordshire. 1816 
was a happy year for the Lambs — though it, too, was a lean 
year for literature and even for letters. 

1817. Lamb removed to No. 20 Russell Street, Covent Garden. 
This move brought him near to the theatres — Covent Garden 
Theatre at the back and Drury Lane diagonally just across 
the way. Thus Lamb added many theatrical personages to 
his list of friends and acquaintances, notably Miss Kelly, 
Mundun, and Macready. On December 28th Lamb attended 
a party at Haydon's in Lisson Grove, a party which has 
become immortal for two reasons : first because Wordsworth, 
Lamb, Keats, and Landseer were there, and secondly because 
it was there that the unfortunate Comptroller of Stamps, a 
Mr. Kingston, was made the victim of one of Lamb's immortal 
jokes. The story is told in nearly all biographies of Lamb. 
(Cf. Ainger's Life, p. 85 ff.) 

1818. Lamb's complete works were published in two volumes. 

1819. He proposed marriage to Fanny Kelly, but was rejected. 

1820. Lamb was presented by Hazlitt to the editor of the newly 
established London Magazine. Lamb wrote his first essay, 
" The South-Sea House," for the August number of the Lon- 
don. From this time we may date the high tide of Charles 
Lamb's genius. 

1821. John Lamb, Charles's brother, died. His death inspired 
Lamb to write his beautiful essay, " Dream-Children." 

1822. The Lambs visited France, where Mary had another brief 
attack of her malady. Lamb left but little record of this 
visit, and never referred to it in his Essays. 



BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE XI 

1823. The Essays of Elia, Lamb's best-known book, was published. 
Lamb left London for Colebrook Row, Islington. 

1 824. Lamb was in indifferent health and published nothing between 
December, 1823, and September, 1824. Elia was resumed iu 
September with " Blakesmoor in H shire." 

1825. On March 29th Lamb retired from the service of the East 
India House with a pension of £450. (See notes on " The 
Superannuated Man.") 

1826. He began his " Popular Fallacies " in the January issue of the 
New Monthly Magazine. The London Magazine came to an, 
end. 

1827. He wrote the exquisite lines " On an Infant Dying as soon as 
Born " — in memory of the lost child of Tom Hood. In Sep- 
tember the Lambs moved to Chase Side, Enfield. (See note 
on "Old China.") 

1828. An American edition of Lamb's Essays was published. 

1829. Owing to Mary's frequent relapses, Lamb took lodgings with 
the Westwoods, at their cottage, " forty-two inches nearer 
London." 

1830. Lamb's Album Verses was published by Maxon, who was 
later the husband of the adopted daughter of Charles and 
Mary Lamb, Emma Isola. 

1833. Lamb removed to Bay Cottage, Edmonton. He also pub- 
lished The Last Essays of Ella. 

1834. In July Coleridge died, and the loss of his lifelong friend was 
Lamb's death-blow. On December 27th, " murmuring in his 
last moments the names of his dearest friends, he passed 
tranquilly out of life." "On the following Saturday his 
remains were laid in a deep grave in Edmonton churchyard, 
made in a spot which, about a fortnight before, he had pointed 
out to his sister on an afternoon's wintry walk, as the place 
where he wished to be buried." 

1847. Mary Lamb died, aged 82, on May 20th. 



A SELECTED LIST OF BOOKS RELATING TO LAMB 

I. Editions 

Lucas, E. V., Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, 7 vols. 
MacDonald, William, The Works of Charles Lamb, 12 vols. 
AiNGER, Alfred, The Works of Charles Lamb, 6 vols. 

II. Biography 

Lucas, E. V., The Life of Charles Lamb, 2 vols. 

AiNGER, Alfred, Charles Lamb, in the "English Men of Let- 
ters" series. 

De Quince y, Thomas, Biographical Essays. 

Talfourd, Thomas Noon, Memoirs of Charles Lamb, edited 
and annotated by Percy Fitzgerald. 

Fitzgerald, Percy, Charles Lamb, His Friends, His Haunts, 
and His Books. 

Procter, B. W. ("Barry Cornwall"), Charles Lamb: A Memoir, 

Martin, E. B., In tlie Footprints of Charles Lamb. 

III. Criticism and Appreciations 

Pater, Walter, Appreciations. 

Patmore, p. G., My Friends and Acquaintances. 

Robinson, Henry Crabb, Diary. 

Hunt, Leigh, Autobiography . 

Hazlitt, William, Spirit of the Age, Essay, "On Persons 

One Would Wish to Have Seen." 
Swinburne, A. C, Miscellanies, essay on "Charles Lamb and 

George Wither." 
Birrell, Augustine, Obiter Dicta. 
Gilchrist, Mrs., Mary Lamb. 
Stoddard, R. H., Personal Recollections. 
HuTTON, Laurence, Literary Landmarks of London. 
Southey, C. C, Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey. 

xii 



LAMB'S PERSONAL TRAITS 

In His Schooldays 

"Lamb was an amiable, gentle boy, very sensible and 
keenly observing, indulged by his school-fellows and by his 
master on account of his infirmity of speech. His counte- 
nance was mild, his complexion clear brown, with an ex- 
pression which might lead you to think that he was of Jewish 
descent. His eyes were not each of the same color, one was 
hazel, the other had specks of gray in the iris, mingled as we 
see red spots in the blood-stone. His step was plantigrade, 
which made his walk slow and pecuHar, adding to the staid 
appearance of his figure. I never heard his name mentioned 
without the addition of Charles, although, as there was no 
other boy of the name of Lamb, the addition was unneces- 
sary; but there was an implied kindness in it, and it was a 
proof that his gentle manners excited that kindness. His 
delicate frame and his difficulty of utterance, which was 
increased by agitation, unfitted him for joining in any bois- 
terous.sport.'' — Charles V. Le Grige. 

His Personal Appearance and Some Characteristics 

"I do not know whether Lamb had any oriental blood in 
his veins, but certainly the most marked complexional char- 
acteristic of his head was a Jewish look, which pervaded 
every portion of it, even to the sallow and uniform complexion, 
and the black and crispy hair standing off loosely from the 
head, as if every single hair was independent of the rest. 
The nose, too, was large and slightly hooked, and the chin 
rounded and elevated to correspond. There was altogether 
a Rabbinical look about Lamb's head, which was at once 
striking and impressive. 

xiii 



Xiv INTRODUCTION 

"Thus much of form chiefly. In point of intellectual 
character and expression, a finer face was never seen, nor one 
more fully, however vaguely, corresponding with the mind 
whose features it interpreted. There was the gravity usually 
engendered by a life passed in book-learning, without the 
slightest tinge of that assumption and affectation which 
almost always attend the gravity so engendered; the inten- 
sity and elevation of general expression that mark high 
genius, without any of its pretension and its odditj^: the 
sadness waiting on fruitless thoughts and baffled aspirations, 
but no evidences of that spirit of scorning and contempt 
which these are apt to engender. Above all, there was a 
pervading sweetness and gentleness which went straight to 
the heart of every one who looked on it; and not less so 
perhaps that it bore about it an air, a something, seeming to 
tell that it was not put on — for nothing would be more 
unjust than to tax Lamb with assuming anything, even a 
virtue, which he did not possess — but preserved and per- 
severed in spite of opposing and contradictory feelings within, 
that struggled in vain for mastery."" 

— Peter G. Patmore in My Friends aiid Acquaintances. 

" Charles Lamb had a head worthy of Aristotle, with as fine 
a heart as ever beat in human bosom, and limbs very fragile 
to sustain it, . . . There never was a true portrait of Lamb. 
His features were strongly yet delicately cut ; he had a fine 
eye as well as forehead; and no face carried in it greater 
marks of thought and feeling. ... As his frame, so was his 
genius. It was as fit for thought as could be, and equally 
as unfit for action; and this rendered him melancholy, ap- 
prehensive, humorous, and willing to make the best of every- 
thing as it was, both from tenderness of heart, and abhorrence 
of alteration. His understanding was too great to admit an 
absurdity; his frame was not strong enough to deliver it 
from a fear. His sensibility to strong contrasts was the 
foundation of his humor, which was that of a wit at once 
melancholy and willing to be pleased. He would beard a 
superstition, and shudder at the old phantasm while he did 



LAMB S PERSONAL TRAITS XV 

it. One could have imagined him cracking a jest in the teeth 
of a ghost, and then melting into thin air himself, out of 
sympathy with the awful." — Leigh Hunt in Autobiography. 

His Conversation 

"There was L himseK, the most delightful, the most 

provoking, the most witty and sensible of men. He always 
made the best pun, and the best remark in the course of the 
evening. His serious conversation, like his serious writing, 
is his best. No one ever stammered out such fine, piquant, 
deep, eloquent things in half a dozen hah-sentences as he 
does. His jests scald like tears: and he probes a question 
with a play upon words. . . . There was no fuss or cant 
about him ; nor were his sweets or his sours ever diluted with 
one particle of affectation. 

— William Hazlitt in Conversation of Authors. 

His Stammering 

"In miscellaneous gatherings Lamb said little unless an 
opening arose for a pun. And how effectual that sort of 
small shot was from him, I need not say to anybody who 
remembers his infirmity of stammering, and his dexterous 
management of it for purposes of light and shade. He was 
often able to train the roll of stammers into settling upon the 
words immediately preceding the effective one, by which 
means the keynote of the jest or sarcasm, benefitting b}^ the 
sudden liberation of his embargoed voice, was delivered with 
the force of a pistol-shot. That stammer was worth an 
annul tj^ to him as an ally of his wit. Firing under coA'er of 
that advantage he did triple execution; for, in the first pJace, 
the distressing s}Tnpathy of the hearers with his distress of 
utterance won for him unavoidably the silence of deep atten- 
tion ; and then, whilst he had us all hoaxed into attitude of 
mute suspense by an appearance of distress that he perhaps 
did not really feel, down came a plunging shot into the very 
thick of us, T\4th ten times the effect it would else have had." 
— Thomas De Quincey in Biographical Essays. 



XVI INTRODUCTION 

His Eumor 

"Charles was frequently merry; but ever at the back of 
his merriment there reposed a grave depth, in which rich 
colors and tender lights were inlaid. For his jests sprang 
from his sensibility; which was as open to pleasure as to 
pain. This sensibility, if it somewhat impaired his vigor, 
led him into curious and delicate fancies, and taught him a 
liking for things of the highest relish, which a mere robust 
jester never tastes.'' 

— Bryan W. Procter in Charles Lamb : a Memoir. 



His Whimsicality 

"His style of playful bluntness when speaking to his inti- 
mates was strangely pleasant — nay, welcome : it gave you 
the impression of his liking you well enough to be rough and 
unceremonious with you : it showed you that he felt at home 
with you. It accorded with what you knew to be at the 
root of an ironical assertion he made — that he always gave 
away gifts, parted with presents, and sold keepsakes. It 
underlay in sentiment the drollery and reversed truth of his 
saying to us, ' I always call my sister Maria when we are alone 
together, Mary when we are with our friends, and Moll before 
the servants.'" 

— Mary Cowden Clarke in Recollections of Writers. 

His Hatred of Affectation 

"The very basis of Lamb's character was laid in horror of 
affectation. If he found himself by accident using a rather 
fine word, notwithstanding that it might be the most forcible 
in that place (the word arrest, suppose, in certain situations 
for the word catch), he would, if it were allowed to stand, 
make merry with his own grandiloquence at the moment; 
and, in after-moments, he would continually ridicule that 
class of words, by others carried to an extreme of pedantry." 
— Thomas De Quincey in Literary Reminiscences. 



lamb's peesonal traits xvii 

"Lamb never affected any spurious gravity. Neither did 
he ever act the Grand Senior. He did not exact that com- 
mon copy-book respect, which some asinine persons would 
fain command on account of the mere length of their years. 
. . . There was nothing of Sir Oracle about Lamb. On 
the contrary, at sight of a solemn visage that ' creamed and 
mantled like the standing pool/ he was the first to pitch a 
mischievous stone to disturb the duck-weed. 'He was a 
boy-man/ as he truly said of Elia; 'and his manners lagged 
behind his years.' He liked to herd with people younger 
than himself. Perhaps, in his fine generalizing way, he 
thought that, in relation to eternity, we are all contempora- 
ries. However, without reckoning birthdays, it was always 
' Hail fellow, well met ; ' and although he was my elder by a 
quarter of a century, he never made me feel, in our excur- 
sions, that I was 'taking a walk with the schoolmaster.' '' 
— Thomas Hood in Literary Reminiscences. 

"He was the most humble and unpretending of human 
beings, the most thoroughly sincere, the most impatient of 
simulation or dissimulation, and the one who threw himself 
the most unreservedly for your good opinion upon the plain 
natural expression of his real qualities, as nature had formed 
them, without artifice, or design, or disguise more than you 
find in the most childlike of children.'' 

— Thomas De Quincey in Literary Reminiscences. 

His Love for Old Authors 

"No one, as I believe, will ever taste the flavor of certain 
writers as he has done. He was the last true lover of An- 
tiquity. Although he admitted a few of the beauties of 
modern times, yet in his stronger love he soared backward 
to old acclivities, and loved to rest there. He had more real 
knowledge of old English literature than any man whom I 
ever knew. He was not an antiquarian. He neither hunted 
after commas, nor scribbled notes which confounded his 
text. The Spirit of the author descended upon him; and 



XVlll INTRODUCTION 

he felt it. With Burton and Fuller, Jeremy Taylor, and Sir 
Thomas Browne, he was intimate. The ancient poets, chiefly 
the dramatic poets, were his especial friends. He knew 
every point and turn of their wit, all the beauty of their 
characters; loving each for some one distinguishing par- 
ticular, and despising none.'' 

— Bryan W. Procter in Charles Lamb : a Memoir. 

"Mr. Lamb has the very soul of an antiquarian, as this 
implies a reflecting humanity; the film of the past hovers 
forever before him. He is shy, sensitive, the reverse of 
everything coarse, vulgar, obtrusive, and commonplace. His 
spirit clothes itself in the garb of elder time, homelier but 
more durable. ... 

"Mr. Lamb has a distaste to new faces, to new books, to 
new buildings, to new customs. . . . His affections revert 
to and settle on the past; but then even this must have 
something personal and local in it to interest him deeply and 
thoroughly. He pitches his tent in the suburbs of existing 
manners, and brings down his account of character to the 
few straggling remains of the last generation." 

— William Hazlitt in Spirit of the Age. 

"Mr. Lamb is the only imitator of old English style I can 
read with pleasure ; and he is so thoroughly imbued with the 
spirit of his authors, that the idea of imitation is almost done 
away. There is an inward unction, a marrowy vein both in 
the thought and feeling, an intuition, deep and lively, of his 
subject, that carries off any quaintness or awkwardness aris- 
ing from an antiquated style and dress. The matter is com- 
pletely his own, though the manner is assumed. Perhaps his 
ideas are altogether so marked and individual, as to require 
their point and pungency to be neutralized by the affectation 
of a singular but traditional form of conveyance. Tricked 
out in the prevailing costume, they would probably seem 
more startling and out of the way. The old English authors. 
Burton, Fuller, Coryate, Sir Thomas Browne, are a kind of 
mediators between us and the more eccentric and whimsical 



LAMB S PERSONAL TRAITS XIX 

modern, reconciling us to his peculiarities. I must confess 
that what I like best of his papers under the signature of 
Elia (still I do not presume, amidst such excellence, to decide 
what is most excellent) is the account of Mrs. Battle's ' Opin- 
ions on Whist,' which is also the most free from obsolete 
allusions and turns of expression, — 

'"A well of native English undefiled.' " 

— William Hazlitt in Table Talk. 

His Dislike for the Country 

"Very curious was the antipathy of Charles to objects that 
are generally so pleasant to other men. It was not a passing 
humor, but a lifelong dislike. He admired the trees, and 
the meadows, and murmuring streams in poetry. I have 
heard him repeat some of Keats 's beautiful lines in the *Ode 
to the Nightingale,' about the 'pastoral eglantine,' with great 
delight. But that was another thing: that was an. object 
in its proper place: that was a piece of art. Long ago he 
had admitted that the mountains of Cumberland were grand 
objects Ho look at, but' (as he said) Hhe houses in the street 
were the places to live in.' I imagine that he would no more 
have received the former as an equivalent for his own modest 
home, than he would have accepted a portrait as a substitute 
for a friend. He was, beyond all other men whom I have 
met, essentially metropolitan. He loved 'the sweet security 
of streets,' as he said; 'I would set up my tabernacle there.'" 
— Bryan W. Procter in Charles Lamb : a Memoir. 

"The country was to Lamb precisely what London is to 
thoroughly country people born and bred, who, however they 
may long to see it for the first time, and are lost in a week's 
empty admiration of its 'sights and wonders,' would literally 
die of homesickness if compelled to remain long in it. I 
remember, when wandering once with Lamb among the 
pleasant scenery about Enfield shortly after his retirement 
there, I was congratulating him on the change between these 
walks and his accustomed ones about Ishngton, Dalston, and 



XX INTRODUCTION 

the like. But I soon found that I was treading on tender 
ground, and he declared afterwards, with a vehemence of 
expression extremely unusual with him, and almost with 
tears in his eyes, that the most squalid garret in the most 
confined and noisome purlieu of London would be a paradise 
to him, compared with the fairest dwelling placed in the 
loveliest scenery of Hhe country/ 'I hate the country!' he 
exclaimed, in a tone and with an emphasis which showed not 
only that the feeling came from the bottom of his soul, but 
that it was working ungentle and sinister results there, that 
he was himself almost alarmed at. Away from London, 
Lamb's spirits seemed to shrink and retire inwards and his 
body to fade and wither like a plant in an uncongenial soil." 
— Peter G. Patmore in My Friends and Acquaintances. 

His Delight in Children 

"He delighted in children, and in teUing them strange, 
wild stories. A daughter of Sheridan Knowles used to tell 
how, as a very little girl, she had been taken out by Charles 
Lamb for a day's holiday to see all the shows, and how on 
meeting a Punch's show, they sat down together on a door- 
step and saw the entertainment through not only one, but 
a whole series, which for him as well as for his little compan- 
ion seemed to have an inexhaustible charm. Once too, I 
have heard on the same authority, he saw a group of hun- 
gry little faces wistfully looking into the window of a pastry 
cook's shop ; he went in and came out, and distributed cakes 
all around." 

— Percy Fitzgerald in Charles Lamb, his Friends, his 
Haunts, and his Books. 

His Heroism 

"The fact that distinguished Charles Lamb from other 
men was his entire devotion to one grand and tender pur- 
pose. There is, probably, a romance involved in every life. 
In his life it exceeded that of others. In gravity, in acute- 
ness, in his noble battle with a great calamity, it was beyond 



lamb's personal traits xxi 

the rest. Neither the pleasure nor the toil ever distracted 
him from his holy purpose. Everything was made sub- 
servient to it. He had an insane sister, who, in a moment 
of uncontrollable madness, had unconsciously destroyed her 
own mother ; and to protect and save this sister — a gentle 
woman, who had watched like a mother over his own infancy 
— the whole length of his life was devoted. What he en- 
dured, through the space of nearly forty years, from the 
incessant fear and frequent recurrence of his sister's insanity, 
can now only be conjectured. In this constant and uncom- 
plaining endurance, and in his steady adherence to a great 
principle of conduct, his life was heroic." 

— Bryan W. Procter in Charles Lamb : a Memoir. 

" Except to the few who were acquainted with the tragical 
occurrences of Lamb's early life, some of his peculiarities 
seemed strange, — to be forgiven, indeed, to the excellences 
of his nature and the dehcacy of his genius, but still, in 
themselves, as much to be wondered at as deplored. The 
sweetness of his character, breathed through his writings, 
was felt even by strangers; but its heroic aspect was un- 
guessed, even by many of his friends. Let them now con- 
sider it, and ask if the annals of self-sacrifice can show any- 
thing in human action and endurance more lovely than its 
self-devotion exhibits ! It was not merely that he saw, 
through the ensanguined cloud of misfortune which had 
fallen upon his family, the unstained excellence of his sister, 
whose madness had caused it ; that he was ready to take her 
to his own home with reverential affection, and cherish her 
through life; that he gave up for her sake all meaner and 
more selfish love, and all the hopes which youth blends with 
the passion which disturbs and ennobles it; not even that 
he did all this cheerfully, and without pluming himself upon 
his brotherly nobleness as a virtue, or seeking to repay him- 
self (as some uneasy martyrs do) by small instalments of long 
repining, — but that he carried the spirit of the hour in which 
he first knew and took his course, to his last." 

— Thomas N. Talfourd in Memoirs of Charles Lamb. 



2 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

huge charts, which subsequent discoveries have antiquated; 

— dusty maps of Mexico, dim as dreams, and soundings of 
the Bay of Panama ! The long passages hung with buckets, 
appended, in idle row, to walls, whose substance might defy 
any, short of the last, conflagration: with vast ranges of 
cellarage under all, where dollars and pieces of eight once 
lay, an "unsunned heap," ^ for Mammon to have solaced 
his solitary heart withal — long since dissipated, or scat- 
tered into air at the blast of the breaking of that famous 
Bubble. 

Such is the South-Sea House. At least such it was 
forty years ago, when I knew it — a magnificent relic ! 
What alterations may have been made in it since, I have 
had no opportunities of verifying. Time, I take for granted, 
has not freshened it. No wind has resuscitated the face 
of the sleeping waters. A thicker crust by this time stag- 
nates upon it. The moths, that were then battening upon 
its obsolete ledgers and day-books, have rested from their 
depredations, but other light generations have succeeded, 
making fine fretwork among their single and double entries. 
Layers of dust have accumulated (a superfoetation of dirt !) 
upon the old layers, that seldom used to be disturbed, save 
by some curious finger, now and then, inquisitive to explore 
the mode of book-keeping in Queen Anne's reign; or, with 
less hallowed curiosity, seeking to unveil some of the mysteries 
of that tremendous hoax, whose extent the petty peculators 
of our day look back upon with the same expression of in- 
credulous admiration and hopeless ambition of rivalry, as 
would become the puny face of modern conspiracy con- 
templating the Titan size of Vaux's superhuman plot. 

Peace to the manes of the Bubble ! Silence and des- 
titution are upon thy walls, proud house, for a memorial ! 

Situated, as thou art, in the very heart of stirring and 
living commerce — amid the fret and fever of speculation 

— with the Bank, and the 'Change, and the India House 

^ From Milton's Comus, 398. Lamb may also have had in mind 
the treasury of Mammon as described in the Faerie Queene, Book ii. 
canto 7, stanzas 3, 4, 5, and 20. 



THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE 6 

about thee, in the heyday of present prosperity, with their 
important faces, as it were, insulting thee, their poor neigh- 
bor out of business — to the idle and merely contemplative 

— to such as me, old house ! there is a charm in thy quiet : 

— a cessation — a coolness from business — an indolence 
almost cloistral — which is delightful ! With what reverence 
have I paced thy great bare rooms and courts at eventide ! 
They spoke of the past : — the shade of some dead account- 
ant, with visionary pen in ear, would flit by me, stiff as in 
life. Living accounts and accountants puzzle me. I have 
no skill in figuring. But thy great dead tomes, which scarce 
three degenerate clerks of the present day could lift from 
their enshrining shelves — with their old fantastic flourishes 
and decorative rubric interlacings — their sums in triple 
columniations, set down with formal superfluity of ciphers 

— with pious sentences at the beginning, without which 
our religious ancestors never ventured to open a book of 
business, or biU of lading — the costly vellum covers of some 
of them almost persuading us that we are got into some 
better library — are very agreeable and edifying spectacles. 
I can look upon these defunct dragons with complacency. 
Thy heavy odd-shaped ivory-handled penknives (our an- 
cestors had everything on a larger scale than we have hearts 
for) are as good as anything from Herculaneum. The 
pounce-boxes of our days have gone retrograde. 

The very clerks which I remember in the South-Sea House 

— I speak of forty years back — had an air very different 
from those in the public offices that I have had to do with 
since. They partook of the genius of the place ! 

They were mostly (for the establishment did not admit 
of superfluous salaries) bachelors. Generally (for they 
had not much to do) persons of a curious and speculative 
turn of mind. Old-fashioned, for a reason mentioned 
before; humorists, for they were of all descriptions; and, 
not having been brought together in early life (which has 
a tendency to assimilate the members of corporate bodies 
to each other"), but, for the most part, placed in this house 
in ripe or middle age, they necessarily carried into it their 



4 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

separate habits and oddities, unqualified, if I may so speak, 
as into a common stock. Hence they formed a sort of Noah's 
ark. Odd fishes. A lay-monastery. Domestic retainers 
in a great house, kept more for show than use. Yet pleasant 
fellows, full of chat — and not a few among them had arrived 
at considerable proficiency on the German flute. 

The cashier at that time was one Evans, a Cambro-Briton. 
He had something of the choleric complexion of his country- 
men stamped on his visage, but was a worthy, sensible man 
at bottom. He wore his hair, to the last, powdered and 
frizzed out, in the fashion which I remember to have seen 
in caricatures of what were termed, in my young days, Mac- 
caronies. He was the last of that race of beaux. Melan- 
choly as a gib-cat over his counter all the forenoon, I think 
I see him making up his cash (as they call it) with tremulous 
fingers, as if he feared every one about him was a defaulter ; 
in his hypochondry, ready to imagine himself one ; haunted, 
at least, with the idea of the possibility of his becoming one : 
his tristful visage clearing up a little over his roast neck of 
veal at Anderton's at two (where his picture still hangs, taken 
a little before his death by desire of the master of the coffee- 
house which he had frequented for the last five-and-twenty 
years), but not attaining the meridian of its animation till 
evening brought on the hour of tea and visiting. The 
simultaneous sound of his well-known rap at the door with 
the stroke of the clock announcing six, was a topic of never- 
failing mirth in the families which this dear old bachelor 
gladdened with his presence. Then was his forte, his glorified 
hour ! How would he chirp and expand over a muffin ! 
How would he dilate into secret history ! His countryman, 
Pennant himself, in particular, could not be more eloquent 
than he in relation to old and new London — the site of old 
theatres, churches, streets gone to decay — where Rosa- 
mond's pond stood — the Mulberry Gardens — and the 
Conduit in Cheap — with many a pleasant anecdote, derived 
from paternal tradition, of those grotesque figures which 
Hogarth has immortalized in his picture of Noon — the 
worthy descendants of those heroic confessors, who, flying 



THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE 5 

to this country from the wrath of Louis the Fourteenth and 
his dragoons, kept ahve the flame of pure rehgion in the 
sheltering obscurities of Hog Lane and the vicinity of the 
Seven Dials ! 

Deputy, under Evans, was Thomas Tame. He had the 
air and stoop of a nobleman. You would have taken him 
for one, had you met him in one of the passages leading to 
Westminster Hall. By stoop, I mean that gentle bending 
of the body forwards, which, in great men, must be supposed 
to be the effect of an habitual condescending attention to the 
applications of their inferiors. While he held you in con- 
verse, you felt strained to the height in the colloquy. The 
conference over, you were at leisure to smile at the compara- 
tive insignificance of the pretensions which had just awed 
you. His intellect was of the shallowest order. It did not 
reach to a saw or a proverb. His mind was in its original 
state of white paper. A sucking babe might have posed him. 
What was it then ? Was he rich ? Alas, no ! Thomas 
Tame was very poor. Both he and his wife looked outwardly 
gentlefolks, when I fear all was not well at all times within. 
She had a neat meagre person, which it was evident she had 
not sinned in over-pampering; but in its veins was noble 
blood. She traced her descent, by some labyrinth of relation- 
ship, which I never thoroughly understood, — much less can 
explain with any heraldic certainty at this time of day, — • 
to the illustrious but unfortunate house of Derwentwater. 
This was the secret of Thomas's stoop. This was the thought 
— the sentiment — the bright solitary star of your lives, — 
ye mild and happy pair, — which cheered you in the night 
of intellect, and in the obscurity of your station ! This was 
to you instead of riches, instead of rank, instead of glittering 
attainments: and it was worth them all together. You 
insulted none with it; but, while you wore it as a piece of 
defensive armor only, no insult likewise could reach you 
through it. Decus et solamen} 

Of quite another stamp was the then accountant, John 
Tipp. He neither pretended to high blood, nor in good 

^ Honor and consolation, Vergil, ^neid, x. 858. 



6 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

truth cared one fig about the matter. He "thought an 
accountant the greatest character in the world, and him- 
self the greatest accountant in it." Yet John was not 
without his hobby. The fiddle relieved his vacant hours. 
He sang, certainly, with other notes than to the Orphean 
lyre. He did, indeed, scream and scrape most abomi- 
nably. His fine suite of official rooms in Threadneedle 
Street, which, without anything very substantial appended 
to them, were enough to enlarge a man's notions of himself 
that lived in them (I know not who is the occupier of them 
now^), resounded fortnightly to the notes of a concert of 
"sweet breasts,^' as our ancestors would have called them, 
culled from club-rooms, and orchestras — chorus singers — 
first and second violoncellos — double basses — and clario- 
nets — who ate his cold mutton, and drank his punch, and 
praised his ear. He sat like Lord Midas among them. But 
at the desk Tipp was quite another sort of creature. Thence 
all ideas, that were purely ornamental, were banished. You 
could not speak of anything romantic without rebuke. 
Politics were excluded. A newspaper was thought too re- 
fined and abstracted. The whole duty of man consisted in 
writing off dividend warrants. The striking of the annual 
balance in the company's books (which, perhaps, differed 
from the balance of last year in the sum of £25, Is. 6d.) occu- 
pied his days and nights for a month previous. Not that 
Tipp was blind to the deadness of things (as they called them 
in the city) in his beloved house, or did not sigh for a re- 
turn of the old stirring days when South-Sea hopes were 
young (he was indeed equal to the wielding of any the most 
intricate accounts of the most flourishing company in these 
or those days) : but to a genuine accountant the difference 



^ I have since been informed, that the present tenant of them 
is a Mr. Lamb, a gentleman who is happy in the possession of some 
choice pictures, and among them a rare portrait of Milton, which I 
mean to do myself the pleasure of going to see, and at the same 
time to refresh my memory with the sight of old scenes. Mr. Lamb 
has the character of a right -courteous and communicative collector. 
[Lamb's note.] 



THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE 7 

of proceeds is as nothing. The fractional farthing is as dear 
to his heart as the thousands which stand before it. He is 
the true actor, who, whether his part be a prince or a peasant, 
must act it with hke intensity. With Tipp form was every- 
thing. His Hfe was formal. His actions seemed ruled with 
a ruler. His pen was not less erring than his heart. He 
made the best executor in the world : he was plagued with 
incessant executorships accordingly, which excited his spleen 
and soothed his vanity in equal ratios. He would swear 
(for Tipp swore) at the little orphans, whose rights he would 
guard with a tenacity like the grasp of the dying hand that 
commended their interests to his protection. With all this 
there was about him a sort of timidity (his few enemies used 
to give it a worse name) — a something which, in reverence 
to the dead, we will place, if you please, a little on this side 
of the heroic. Nature certainly had been pleased to endow 
John Tipp with a sufficient measure of the principle of self- 
preservation. There is a cowardice which we do not despise, 
because it has nothing base or treacherous in its elements; 
it betrays itself, not you: it is mere temperament; the 
absence of the romantic and the enterprising; it sees a lion 
in the way, and will not, with Fortinbras, "greatly find 
quarrel in a straw," ^ when some supposed honor is at 
stake. Tipp never mounted the box of a stage-coach in 
his life; or leaned against the rails of a balcony; or walked 
upon the ridge of a parapet; or looked down a precipice; 
or let off a gun ; or went upon a water-party ; or would will- 
ingly let you go if he could have helped it: neither was it 
recorded of him, that for lucre, or for intimidation, he ever 
forsook friend or principle. 

Whom next shall we summon from the dusty dead,^ in 
whom common qualities become uncommon? Can I for- 
get thee, Henry Man, the wit, the polished man of letters, 
the author, of the South-Sea House? who never enteredst 
thy office in a morning or quittedst it in midday (what 
didst thou in an office?) without some quirk that left a 
sting ! Thy gibes and thy jokes are now extinct, or survive 

^Hamlet, iv. 4. 53-56. ^ Cf . Macbeth, v. 5. 22. 



8 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

but in two forgotten volumes, which I had the good fortune 
to rescue from a stall in Barbican, not three days ago, and 
found thee terse, fresh, epigrammatic, as alive. Thy wit is 
a little gone by in these fastidious days — thy topics are 
staled by the "new-born gauds "^ of the time: — but great 
thou used to be in Public Ledgers, and in Chronicles, upon 
Chatham, and Shelburne, and Rockingham, and Howe, and 
Burgoyne, and Clinton, and the war which ended in the 
tearing from Great Britain her rebellious colonies, — and 
Keppel, and Wilkes, and Sawbridge, and Bull, and Dunning, 
and Pratt, and Richmond — and such small politics. 

A little less facetious, and a great deal more obstreperous, 
was fine rattling, rattleheaded Plumer. He was descended, 
— not in a right line, reader (for his lineal pretensions, like 
his personal, favored a little of the sinister bend) — from 
the Plumers of Hertfordshire. So tradition gave him out; 
and certain family features not a little sanctioned the opinion. 
Certainly old Walter Plumer (his reputed author) had been 
a rake in his days, and visited much in Italy, and had seen 
the world. He was uncle, bachelor-uncle, to the fine old 
whig Gtill living, who has represented the county in so many 
successive parliaments, and has a fine old mansion near 
Ware. Walter flourished in George the Second's days, and 
was the same who was summoned before the House of Com- 
mons about a business of franks, with the old Duchess of 
Marlborough. You may read of it in Johnson's Life of 
Cave. Cave came off cleverly in that business. It is cer- 
tain our Plumer did nothing to discountenance the rumor. 
He rather seemed pleased whenever it was, with all gentle- 
ness, insinuated. But besides his family pretensions, Plumer 
was an engaging fellow, and sang gloriously. 

Not so sweetly sang Plumer as thou sangest, mild, child- 
like, pastoral M ; a flute's breathing less divinely whis- 
pering than thy Arcadian melodies, when, in tones worthy 
of Arden, thou didst chant that song sung by Amiens to the 
banished duke, which proclaims the winter wind more lenient 
than for a man to be ungrateful. Thy sire was old surly 

^ Troilus and Cressida, iii, 3. 175. 



OXFORD IN THE VACATION 9 

M , the unapproachable church-warden of Bishopsgate. 

He knew not what he did, when he begat thee, hke spring, 
gentle offspring of blustering winter : — only unfortunate in 
thy ending, which should have been mild, conciliatory, 
swan-like. 

Much remains to sing. Many fantastic shapes rise up, 
but they must be mine in private : — already I have fooled 
the reader to the top of his bent; else could I omit that 
strange creature Woollett, who existed in trying the ques- 
tion, and bought litigations ! — and still stranger, inimitable, 
solemn Hepworth, from whose gravity Newton might have 
deduced the law of gravitation. How profoundly would he 
nib a pen — with what deliberation would he wet a wafer ! • 

But it is time to close — night's wheels are rattling fast 
over me — it is proper to have done with this solemn mockery. 

Reader, what if I have been playing with thee all this 
while — peradventure the very names, which I have sum- 
moned up before thee, are fantastic — insubstantial — like 
Henry Pimpernel, and old John Naps of Greece: 

Be satisfied that something answering to them has had a 
being. Their importance is from the past. 



OXFORD IN THE VACATION 

Casting a preparatory glance at the bottom of this article 
— as the very connoisseur in prints, with cursory eye (which, 
while it reads, seems as though it read not), never fails 
to consult the quis sculpsit^ in the corner, before he pro- 
nounces some rare piece to be a Vivares, or a Woollett — me- 
thinks I hear you exclaim. Reader, Who is Elia? 

Because in my last I tried to divert thee with some half- 
forgotten humors of some old clerks defunct, in an old 
house of business, long since gone to decay, doubtless you 
have already set me down in your mind as one of the self- 

^ The signature of the engraver. "Who was the engraver?" 
is the literal translation. 



10 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

same college — a votary of the desk — a notched and 
cropt scrivener — one that sucks his sustenance, as certain 
sick people are said to do, through a quill. 

Well, I do agnize something of the sort. I confess that 
it is my humor, my fancy — in the fore-part of the day, 
when the mind of your man of letters requires some relaxa- 
tion (and none better than such as at first sight seems most 
abhorrent from his beloved studies) — to while away some 
good hours of my time in the contemplation of indigos, cottons, 
raw silks, piece-goods, flowered or otherwise. In the first 
place . . . and then it sends you home with such increased 
appetite to your books . . . not to say, that your outside 
sheets, and waste wrappers of foolscap, do receive into them, 
most kindly and naturally, the impression of sonnets, epi- 
grams, essays — so that the very parings of a counting- 
house are, in some sort, the settings up of an author. The 
enfranchised quill, that has plodded all the morning among 
the cart-rucks of figures and ciphers, frisks and curvets 
so at its ease over the flowery carpet-ground of a midnight 
dissertation. — It feels its promotion. ... So that you 
see, upon the whole, the literary dignity of Elia is very 
little, if at all, compromised in the condescension. 

Not that, in my anxious detail of the many commodities 
incidental to the life of a public office, I would be thought 
blind to certain flaws, which a cunning carper might be able 
to pick in this Joseph's vest. And here I must have leave, in 
the fulness of my soul, to regret the abolition, and doing- 
away-with altogether, of those consolatory interstices, 
and sprinklings of freedom, through the four seasons, — 
the red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, 
dead-letter days. There was Paul, and Stephen, and Barna- 
bas — 

Andrew and John, men famous in old times. 

— we were used to keep all their days holy, as long back 
as when I was at school at Christ's. I remember their 
effigies, by the same token, in the old Baskett Prayer Book. 
There hung Peter in his uneasy posture — holy Bartlemy 



OXFORD IN THE VACATION 11 

in the troublesome act of flaying, after the famous Marsyas 
by Spagnoletti. — I honored them all, and could almost 
have wept the defalcation of Iscariot — so much did we 
love to keep holy memories sacred : — only methought 
I a little grudged at the coalition of the better Jude with 
Simon — clubbing (as it were) their sanctities together, 
to make up one poor gaudy-day between them — as an 
economy unworthy of the dispensation. 

These were bright visitations in a scholar's and a clerk's 
life — "far off their coming shone.'' ^ — I was as good as an 
almanac in those days. I could have told you such a saint's- 
day falls out next week, or the week after. Perad venture 
the Epiphany, by some periodical infelicity, would, once 
in six years, merge in a Sabbath. Now am I little better 
than one of the profane. Let me not be thought to arraign 
the wisdom of my civil superiors, who have judged the 
further observation of these holy tides to be papistical, 
superstitious. Only in a custom of such long standing, 
methinks, if their Holinesses the Bishops had, in decency, 
been first sounded — but I am wading out of my depths. 
I am not the man to decide the limits of civil and ecclesias- 
tical authority — I am plain Elia — no Selden, nor Arch- 
bishop Usher — though at present in the thick of their 
books, here in the heart of learning, under the shadow 
of the mighty Bodley. 

I can here play the gentleman, enact the student. To 
such a one as myself, who has been defrauded in his young 
years of the sweet food of academic institution, nowhere 
is so pleasant, to while away a few idle weeks at, as one or 
other of the Universities. Their vacation, too, at this time 
of the year, falls in so pat with ours. Here I can take my 
walks unmolested, and fancy myself of what degree or stand- 
ing I please. I seem admitted ad eundem? I fetch up 
past opportunities. I can rise at the chapel-bell, and dream 

1 Paradise Lost, vi. 767-769. 

2 For ad eundem gradum, admitted without examination to the 
same degree; a privilege mutually granted the Universities of 
Cambridge and Oxford. 



12 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

thab it rings for me. In moods of humility I can be a Sizar, 
or a Servitor. When the peacock vein rises, I strut a Gentle- 
man Commoner. In graver moments, I proceed Master 
of Arts. Indeed I do not think I am much unlike that 
respectable character. I have seen your dim-eyed vergers, 
and bed-makers in spectacles, drop a bow or a curtsy, as I 
pass, wisely mistaking me for something of the sort. I 
go about in black, which favors the notion. Only in Christ 
Church reverend quadrangle, I can be content to pass for 
nothing short of a Seraphic Doctor. 

The walks at these times are so much one's own, — the 
tall trees of Christ's, the groves of Magdalen ! The halls 
deserted, and with open doors, inviting one to slip in un- 
perceived, and pay a devoir to some Founder, or noble or 
royal Benefactress (that should have been ours) whose 
portrait seems to smile upon their over-looked beadsman, 
and to adopt me for their own. Then, to take a peep in by 
the way at the butteries, and sculleries, redolent of antique 
hospitality: the immense caves of kitchens, kitchen fire- 
places, cordial recesses; ovens whose first pies were baked 
four centuries ago ; and spits which have cooked for Chaucer ! 
Not the meanest minister among the dishes but is hallowed 
to me through his imagination, and the Cook goes forth 
a Manciple. 

Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that, 
being nothing, art everything ! When thou wert, thou 
wert not antiquity — then thou wert nothing, but hadst a 
remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with 
blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, 
modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or 
what haK Janus es ^ are we, that cannot look forward with 
the same idolatry with which we for ever revert ! The 
mighty future is as nothing, being everything ! the past 
is everything, being nothing ! 

What were thy dark ages ? Surely the sun rose as brightly 
then as now, and man got him to his work in the morning. 
Why is it we can never hear mention of them without 

^ Januses of one face. — Sir Thomas Browne. [Lamb's note.] 



OXFORD IN THE VACATION 13 

an accompanying feeling, as though a palpable obscure 
had dimmed the face of things, and that our ancestors 
wandered to and fro groping ! 

Above all thy rarities, old Oxenford, what do most arride 
and solace me, are thy repositories of mouldering learning, 
thy shelves 

What a place to be in is an old library ! It seems as though 
all the souls of all the writers, that have bequeathed their 
labors to these Bodleians, were reposing here, as in some 
dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to 
profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon 
dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid 
their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented 
coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential 
apples which grew amid the happy orchard. 

Still less have I curiosity to disturb the elder repose of 
MSS. Those varice lectiones,^ so tempting to the more erudite 
palates, do but disturb and unsettle my faith. I am no 
Herculanean raker. The credit of the three witnesses might 
have slept unimpeached for me. I leave these curiosities 
to Porson, and to G. D. — whom, by the way, I found 
busy as a moth over some rotten archive, rummaged out of 
some seldom-explored press, in a nook at Oriel. With long 
poring, he is grown almost into a book. He stood as pas- 
sive as one by the side of the old shelves. I longed to new- 
coat him in russia, and assign him his place. He might 
have mustered for a tall Scapula. 

D. is assiduous in his visits to these seats of learning. 
No inconsiderable portion of his moderate fortune, I appre- 
hend, is consumed in journeys between them and Clifford's 
Inn — where, like a dove on the asp's nest, he has long taken 
up his unconscious abode, amid an incongruous assembly of 
attorneys, attorneys' clerks, apparitors, promoters, vermin of 
the law, among whom he sits, "in calm and sinless peace." ^ 

^ Various readings; referring to the differences in the several 
manuscripts. 

2 An adaptation from Wordsworth's The White Doe of Rylstone, 
line 48. 



14 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

The fangs of the law pierce him not — the winds of Htigation 
blow over his humble chambers — the hard sherijff 's officer 
moves his hat as he passes — legal or illegal discourtesy 
touches him — none thinks of offering violence or injustice 
to him — you would as soon "strike an abstract idea." 

D. has been engaged, he tells me, through a course of 
laborious years, in an investigation into all curious matter 
connected with the two Universities; and has lately lit 

upon a MS. collection of charters, relative to C , by 

which he hopes to settle some disputed points — particu- 
larly that long controversy between them as to priority 
of foundation. The ardor with which he engages in these 
liberal pursuits, I am afraid, has not met with all the en- 
couragement it deserved, either here or at C . Your 

caputs, and heads of colleges, care less than anybody else 
about these questions. — Contented to suck the milky 
fountains of their Alma Maters, without inquiring into 
the venerable gentlewomen's years, they rather hold such 
curiosities to be impertinent — unreverend. They have 
their good glebe lands in manu,^ and care not much to rake 
into the title-deeds. I gather at least so much from other 
sources, for D. is not a man to complain. 

D. started like an unbroke heifer, when I interrupted 
him. A priori ^ it was not very probable that we should 
have met in Oriel. But D. would have done the same, 
had I accosted him on the sudden in his own walks in Clifford's 
Inn, or in the Temple. In addition to a provoking short- 
sightedness (the effect of late studies and watchings 
at the midnight oil), D. is the most absent of men. He 
made a call the other morning at our friend M.'s in Bedford 
Square; and, finding nobody at home, was ushered into 
the hall, where, asking for pen and ink, with great exacti- 
tude of purpose he enters me his name in the book — which 
ordinarily lies about in such places, to record the failures 
of the untimely or unfortunate visitor — and takes his leave 
with many ceremonies, and professions of regret. Some 
two or three hours after, his walking destinies returned 

^ In hand ; in their possession. ^ Presumptively. 



OXFORD IN THE VACATION 15 

him into the same neighborhood again, and again the quiet 
image of the fireside circle at M.'s — Mrs. M. presiding 
at it hke a Queen Lar, with pretty A. S. at her side — strik- 
ing irresistibly on his fancy, he makes another call (forgetting 
that they were "certainly not to return from the country 
before that day week") and disappointed a second time, in- 
quires for pen and paper as before : again the book is brought 
and in the Une just above that in which he is about to print 
his second name (his re-script) — his first name (scarce 
dry) looks out upon him like another Sosia, or as if a man 
should suddenly encounter his own duphcate ! — The effect 
may be conceived. D. made many a good resolution against 
any such lapses in future. I hope he will not keep them 
too rigorously. 

For with G. D. — to be absent from the body, is some- 
times (not to speak it profanely) to be present with the Lord. 
At the very time when, personally encountering thee, he 

passes on with no recognition or, being stopped, starts 

like a thing surprised — at that moment, Reader, he is 
on Mount Tabor — or Parnassus — or co-sphered with 
Plato — or, with Harrington, framing " immortal common- 
wealths" — devising some plan of amehoration to thy 

country, or thy species peradventure meditating some 

individual kindness or courtesy, to be done to thee thyself, 
the returning consciousness of which made him to start 
so guiltily at thy obtruded personal presence. 

[D. commenced life, after a course of hard study in the 
house of "pure Emanuel," as usher to a knavish fanatic 
schoolmaster at . . ., at a salary of eight pounds per annum, 
with board and lodging. Of this poor stipend, he never 
received above half in all the laborious years he served 
this man. He tells a pleasant anecdote, that when poverty, 
staring out at his ragged knees, has sometimes compelled him, 

against the modesty of his nature, to hint at arrears. Dr. 

would take no immediate notice, but after supper, when 
the school was called together to even-song, he would never 
fail to introduce some instructive homily against riches, 
and the corruption of the heart occasioned through the 



16 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

desire of them — ending with "Lord, keep Thy servants, 
above all things, from the heinous sin of avarice. Having 
food and raiment, let us therewithal be content. Give 
me Agur's wish'' — and the like — which, to the httle 
auditory, sounded like a doctrine full of Christian prudence 
and simphcity, but to poor D. was a receipt in full for that 
quarter's demand at least. 

And D. has been under-working for himself ever since; 

— drudging at low rates for unappreciating booksellers, 

— wasting his fine erudition in silent corrections of the 
classics, and in those unostentatious but solid services to 
learning which commonly fall to the lot of laborious scholars, 
who have not the heart to sell themselves to the best ad- 
vantage. He has published poems, which do not sell, 
because their character is unobtrusive, like his own, and 
because he has been too much absorbed in ancient literature 
to know what the popular mark in poetry is, even if he 
could have hit it. And, therefore, his verses are properly, 
what he terms them, crotchets; voluntaries; odes to liberty 
and spring; effusions; little tributes and offerings, left 
behind him upon tables and window-seats at parting 
from friends' houses; and from all the inns of hospitality, 
where he has been courteously (or but tolerably) received 
in his pilgrimage. If his muse of kindness halt a little 
behind the strong lines in fashion in this excitement-loving 
age, his prose is the best of the sort in the world, and ex- 
hibits a faithful transcript of his own healthy, natural mind, 
and cheerful, innocent tone of conversation.] 

D. is delightful anywhere, but he is at the best in such 
places as these. He cares not much for Bath. He is out 
of his element at Buxton, at Scarborough, or Harrowgate. 
The Cam and the Isis are to him "better than all the waters 
of Damascus." On the Muses' hill he is happy, and good, 
as one of the Shepherds on the Delectable Mountains ; and 
when he goes about with you to show you the halls and 
colleges, you think you have with you the Interpreter at 
the House Beautiful. 



Christ's hospitai^ 17 

CHRIST'S HOSPITAL 

FIVE AND THIETY YEARS AGO 

In Mr. Lamb's "Works," published a year or two since, 
I find a magnificent eulogy on my old school,^ such as it 
was, or now appears to him to have been, between the 
years 1782 and 1789. It happens, very oddly, that my 
own standing at Christ's was nearly corresponding with 
his; and, with all gratitude to him for his enthusiasm 
for the cloisters, I think he has contrived to bring together 
whatever can be said in praise of them, dropping all the 
other side of the argument most ingeniously. 

I remember L. at school; and can well recollect that 
he had some peculiar advantages, which I and others of 
his school-fellows had not. His friends lived in town, and 
were near at hand; and he had the privilege of going to 
see them, almost as often as he wished, through some in- 
vidious distinction, which was denied to us. The present 
worthy sub-treasurer to the Inner Temple can explain how 
that happened. He had his tea and hot rolls in a morning, 
while we were battening upon our quarter of a penny loaf — ■ 
our crug — moistened with attenuated small beer, in wooden 
piggins, smacking of the pitched leathern jack it was poured 
from. Our Monday's milk porritch, blue and tasteless, 
and the pease soup of Saturday, coarse and choking, were 
enriched for him with a slice of " extraordinary bread and 
butter," from the hot-loaf of the Temple. The Wednesday's 
mess of millet, somewhat less repugnant — (we had three 
banyan to four meat days in the week) — was endeared 
to his palate with a lump of double-refined, and a smack 
of ginger (to make it go down the more glibly) or the fra- 
grant cinnamon. In lieu of our half-pickled Sundays, 
or quite fresh boiled beef on Thursdays (strong ascaro equina^), 
with detestable marigolds floating in the pail to poison the 

^ Recollections of Christ's Hospital. [Lamb's note.] ^ Horseflesh. 



18 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

broth — our scanty mutton scrags on Fridays — and rather 
more savory, but grudging, portions of the same flesh, rot- 
ten-roasted or rare, on the Tuesdays (the only dish which 
excited our appetites, and disappointed our stomachs, in 
almost equal proportion) — he had his hot plate of roast 
veal, or the more tempting griskin (exotics unknown to our 
palates), cooked in the paternal kitchen (a great thing), 
and brought him daily by his maid or aunt ! I remember 
the good old relative (in whom love forbade pride) squat- 
ting down upon some odd stone in a by-nook of the cloisters, 
disclosing the viands (of higher regale than those cates 
which the ravens ministered to the Tishbite) ; and the con- 
tending passions of L. at the unfolding. There was love 
for the bringer ; shame for the thing brought, and the manner 
of its bringing; sympathy for those who were too many 
to share in it; and, at top of all, hunger (eldest, strongest 
of the passions !) predominant, breaking down the stony 
fences of shame, and awkwardness, and a troubling over- 
consciousness. 

I was a poor friendless boy. My parents, and those who 
should care for me, were far away. Those few acquaintances 
of theirs, which they could reckon upon being kind to me 
in the great city, after a little forced notice, which they had 
the grace to take of me on my first arrival in town, soon grew 
tired of my holiday visits. They seemed to them to recur 
too often, though I thought them few enough ; and, one after 
another, they all failed me, and I felt myself alone among 
six hundred playmates. 

O the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early home- 
stead ! The yearnings which I used to have towards it in 
those unfledged years ! How, in my dreams, would my 
native town (far in the west) come back, with its church, and 
trees, and faces ! How I would wake weeping, and in the 
anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet Calne in Wiltshire ! 

To this late hour of my life, I trace impressions left by the 
recollection of those friendless holidays. The long warm 
days of summer never return but they bring with them a 
gloom from the haunting memory of those whole-day leaves 



Christ's hospital 19 

when, by some strange arrangement, we were turned out, 
for the Uve-long day, upon our own hands, whether we had 
friends to go to, or none. I remember those bathing-excur- 
sions to the New River, which L. recalls with such relish, 
better, I think, than he can — for he, was a home-seeking lad, 
and did not much care for such water-pastimes : — How 
merrily we would sally forth into the fields ; and strip under 
the first warmth of the sun ; and wanton like young dace in 
the streams; getting us appetites for noon, which those of 
us that were penniless (our scanty morning crust long since 
exhausted) had not the means of allaying — while the cattle, 
and the birds, and the fishes, were at feed about us, and we 
had nothing to satisfy our cravings — the very beauty of 
the day, and the exercise of the pastime, and the sense of 
liberty, setting a keener edge upon them ! — How faint and 
languid, finally, we would return, towards night-fall, to our 
desired morsel, half -rejoicing, half -reluctant, that the hours 
of our uneasy liberty had expired ! 

It was worse in the days of winter, to go prowling about 
the streets objectless — shivering at cold windows of print 
shops, to extract a little amusement; or haply, as a last 
resort, in the hopes of a little novelty, to pay a fifty-times 
repeated visit (where our individual faces should be as well 
known to the warden as those of his own charges) to the Lions 
in the Tower — to whose levee, by courtesy immemorial, we 
had a prescriptive title to admission. 

L.'s governor (so we called the patron who presented us 
to the foundation) lived in a manner under his paternal roof. 
Any complaint which he had to make was sure of being 
attended to. This was understood at Christ's, and was an 
effectual screen to him against the severity of masters, or 
worse tyranny of the monitors. The oppressions of these 
young brutes are heart-sickening to call to recollection. I 
have been called out of my bed, and waked for the 'purpose, 
in the coldest winter nights — and this not once, but night 
after night — in my shirt, to receive the discipline of a leath- 
ern thong, with eleven other sufferers, because it pleased 
my callow overseer, when there has been any talking heard 



20 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

after we were gone to bed, to make the six last beds in the 
dormitory, where the youngest children of us slept, answerable 
for an offence they neither dared to commit, nor had the power 
to hinder. — The same execrable tyranny drove the younger 
part of us from the fires, when our feet were perishing with 
snow; and, under the cruellest penalties, forbade the indul- 
gence of a drink of water, when we lay in sleepless summer 
nights, fevered with the season and the day's sports. 

There was one H , who, I learned in after days, was 

seen expiating some maturer offence in the hulks. (Do I 
flatter myself in fancying that this might be the planter of 
that name, who suffered — at Nevis, I think, or St. Kitts, — 
some few years since ? My friend Tobin was the benevolent 
instrument of bringing him to the gallows.) This petty Nero 
actually branded a boy, who had offended him, with a red- 
hot iron ; and nearly starved forty of us, with exacting con- 
tributions, to the one half of our bread, to pamper a young 
ass, which, incredible as it may seem, with the connivance 
of the nurse's daughter (a young flame of his) he had con- 
trived to smuggle in, and keep upon the leads of the ward, 
as they called our dormitories. This game went on for better 
than a week, till the foolish beast, not able to fare well but 
he must cry roast meat — happier than Caligula's minion, 
could he have kept his own counsel — but, foolisher, alas ! 
than any of his species in the fables — waxing fat, and kicking, 
in the fulness of bread, one unlucky minute would needs 
proclaim his good fortune to the world below; and, laying 
out his simple throat, blew such a ram's horn blast, as (top- 
pling down the walls of his own Jericho) set concealment any 
longer at defiance. The client was dismissed, with certain 
attentions, to Smithfield; but I never understood that the 
patron underwent any censure on the occasion. This was 
in the stewardship of L.'s admired Perry. 

Under the ssiine facile administration, can L. have forgotten 
the cool impunity with which the nurses used to carry awaj^ 
openly, in open platters, for their own tables, one out of two 
of every hot joint, which the careful matron had been seeing 
scrupulously weighed out for our dinners? These things 



P3 



o 




Christ's hospital 21 

were daily practised in that magnificent apartment, which 
L. (grown connoisseur since, we presume) praises so highly 
for the grand paintings "by Verrio and others/' with which 
it is "hung round and adorned/' But the sight of sleek 
well-fed blue-coat boys in pictures was, at that time, I believe, 
little consolatory to him, or us, the living ones, who saw the 
better part of our provisions carried away before our faces 
by harpies; and ourselves reduced (with the Trojan in the 
hall of Dido) 

To feed our mind with idle portraiture.^ 

L. has recorded the repugnance of the school to gags, or 
the fat of fresh beef boiled ; and sets it down to some super- 
stition. But these unctuous morsels are never grateful to 
young palates (children are universally fat-haters), and in 
strong, coarse, boiled meats, unsalted, are detestable. A 
gag-eater in our time was equivalent to a goule, and held in 
equal detestation. suffered under the imputation : 

.... 'Twas said 
He ate strange flesh.^ 

He was observed, after dinner, carefully to gather up the 
remnants left at his table (not many, nor very choice frag- 
ments, you may credit me) — and, in an especial manner, 
these disreputable morsels, which he would convey away, and 
secretly stow in the settle that stood at his bedside. None 
saw when he ate them. It was rumored that he privately 
devoured them in the night. He was watched, but no traces 
of such midnight practices were discoverable. Some re- 
ported, that, on leave-days, he had been seen to carry out of 
the bounds a large blue check handkerchief, full of some- 
thing. This then must be the accursed thing. Conjecture 
next was at work to imagine how he could dispose of it. 
Some said he sold it to the beggars. This belief generally 
prevailed. He went about moping. None spake to him. 
No one would play with him. He was excommunicated; 
put out of the pale of the school. He was too powerful a 

* Cf. Vergil's jEneid, i. 464. ^ cf, Antony and Cleopatra, i. 4. 67-68. 



22 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

boy to be beaten, but he underwent every mode of that nega- 
tive punishment, which is more grievous than many stripes. 
Still he persevered. At length he was observed by two of 
his school-fellows, who were determined to get at the secret, 
and had traced him one leave-day for that purpose, to enter 
a large worn-out building, such as there exist specimens of 
in Chancery Lane, which are let out to various scales of 
pauperism, with open door, and a common staircase. After 
him they silently slunk in, and followed by stealth up four 
flights, and saw him tap at a poor wicket, which was opened 
by an aged woman, meanly clad. Suspicion was now ripened 
into certainty. The informers had secured their victim. 
They had him in their toils. Accusation was formally pre- 
ferred, and retribution most signal was looked for. Mr. 
Hathaway, the then steward ' (for this happened a little after 
my time), with that patient sagacity which tempered all his 
conduct, determined to investigate the matter, before he 
proceeded to sentence. The result was, that the supposed 
mendicants, the receivers or purchasers of the mysterious 

scraps, turned out to be the parents of , an honest couple 

come to decay, — whom this seasonable supply had, in all 
probability, saved from mendicancy: and that this young 
stork, at the expense of his own good name, had all this 
while been only feeding the old birds ! — The governors on 
this occasion, much to their honor, voted a present relief 

to the family of , and presented him with a silver medal. 

The lesson which the steward read upon rash judgment, 

on the occasion of publicly delivering the medal to , 

I believe, would not be lost upon his auditory. — I had left 

school then, but I well remember . He was a tall, 

shambling youth, with a cast in his eye, not at all calculated 
to conciliate hostile prejudices. I have since seen him carry- 
ing a baker's basket. I think I heard he did not do quite 
so well by himself as he had done by the old folks. 

I was a hypochondriac lad; and the sight of a boy in 
fetters, upon the day of my first putting on the blue clothes, 
was not exactly fitted to assuage the natural terrors of initia- 
tion. I was of tender years, barely turned of seven ; and had 



Christ's hospital 23 

only read of such things in books, or seen them but in dreams. 
I was told he had run away. This was the punishment for the 
first offence. — As a novice I was soon after taken to see the 
dungeons. These were little, square, Bedlam cells, where a 
boy could just lie at his length upon straw and a blanket — 
a mattress, I think, was afterwards substituted — with a 
peep of light, let in askance, from a prison-orifice at top, 
barely enough to read by. Here the poor boy was locked in 
by himself all day, without sight of any but the porter who 
brought him his bread and water — who might not speak to 
him; — or of the beadle, who came twice a week to call him 
out to receive his periodical chastisement, which was almost 
welcome, because it separated him for a brief interval from 
solitude : -^ and here he was shut up by himself of nights, 
out of the reach of any sound, to suffer whatever horrors the 
weak nerves, and superstition incident to his time of life, 
might subject him to.^ This was the penalty for the second 
offence. Wouldst thou like, Reader, to see what became of 
him in the next degree ? 

The culprit, who had been a third time an offender, and 
whose expulsion was at this time deemed irreversible, was 
brought forth, as at some solemn auto dafe,^ arrayed in un- 
couth and most appalling attire — all trace of his late " watchet 
weeds" carefully effaced, he was exposed in a jacket, re- 
sembling those which London lamplighters formerly delighted 
in, with a cap of the same. The effect of this divestiture was 
such as the ingenious devisers of it could have anticipated. 
With his pale and frighted features, it was as if some of those 
disfigurements in Dante had seized upon him. In this dis- 

^ One or two instances of lunacy, or attempted suicide, accord- 
ingly, at length convinced the governors of the impolicy of this 
part of the sentence, and the midnight torture to the spirits was 
dispensed with. — This fancy of dungeons for children was a sprout 
of Howard's brain; for which (saving the reverence due to Holy 
Paul) methinks I could willingly spit upon his statue. [Lamb's 
note.] 

2 Act of faith (Portuguese). The ceremony of executing a judg- 
ment of the Inquisition by which a heretic was condemned to be 
burned. 



24 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

guisement he was brought into the hall (L.'s favorite state- 
room), where awaited him the whole number of his school- 
fellows, whose joint lessons and sports he was thenceforth to 
share no more ; the awful presence of the steward, to be seen 
for the last time ; of the executioner beadle, clad in his state 
robe for the occasion ; and of two faces more, of direr import, 
because never but in these extremities visible. These were 
governors ; two of whom, by choice, or charter, were always 
accustomed to officiate at these Ultima Supplicia;'^ not to 
mitigate (so at least we understood it), but to enforce the 
uttermost stripe. Old Bamber Gascoigne, and Peter Aubert, 
I remember, were colleagues on one occasion, when the beadle 
turning rather pale, a glass of brandy was ordered to prepare 
him for the mysteries. The scourging was, after the old 
Roman fashion, long and stately. The lictor accompanied 
the criminal quite round the hall. We were generally too 
faint with attending to the previous disgusting circumstances 
to make accurate report with our eyes of the degree of corporal 
suffering inflicted. Report, of course, gave out the back 
knotty and livid. After scourging, he was made over, in his 
San Benito, to his friends, if he had any (but commonly such 
poor runagates were friendless), or to his parish officer, who, 
to enhance the effect of the scene, had his station allotted to 
him on the outside of the hall gate. 

These solemn pageantries were not played off so often as 
to spoil the general mirth of the community. We had 
plenty of exercise and recreation after school hours; and, 
for myself, I must confess that I was never happier than in 
them. The Upper and the Lower Grammar Schools were held 
in the same room ; and an imaginary line only divided their 
bounds. Their character was as different as that of the 
inhabitants on the two sides of the Pyrenees. The Rev. 
James Boyer was the Upper Master, but the Rev. Matthew 
Field presided over that portion of the apartment of which I 
had the good fortune to be a member. We lived a life as 
careless as birds. We talked and did just what we pleased, 
and nobody molested us. We carried an accidence, or a 

^ Extreme punishments, i.e. capital punishments. 



Christ's hospital 25 

grammar, for form ; but, for any trouble it gave us, we might 
take two years in getting through the verbs deponent, and 
another two in forgetting all that we had learned about them. 
There was now and then the formality of saying a lesson, but 
if you had not learned it, a brush across the shoulders (just 
enough to disturb a fly) was the sole remonstrance. Field 
never used the rod ; and in truth he wielded the cane with no 
great good will — holding it "like a dancer.'' ^ It looked in 
his hands rather like an emblem than an instrument of 
authority ; and an emblem, too, he was ashamed of. He was 
a good easy man, that did not care to ruffle his own peace, 
nor perhaps set any great consideration upon the value of 
juvenile time. He came among us, now and then, but often 
staid away whole days from us ; and when he came, it made 
no difference to us — he had his private room to retire to, 
the short time he staid, to be out of the sound of our noise. 
Our mirth and uproar went on. We had classics of our own, 
without being beholden to "insolent Greece or haughty 
Rome,'' ^ that passed current among us — Peter Wilkins 
— The Adventures of the Hon. Capt. Robert Boyle — the 
Fortunate Blue-Coat Boy — and the like. Or we cultivated 
a turn for mechanic or scientific operations; making little 
sun-dials of paper; or weaving those ingenious parentheses, 
called cat-cradles ; or making dry peas to dance upon the end 
of a tin pipe ; or studying the art military over that laudable 
game "French and English," and a hundred other such de- 
vices to pass away the time — mixing the useful with the 
agreeable — as would have made the souls of Rousseau and 
John Locke chuckle to have seen us. 

Matthew Field belonged to that class of modest divines 
who affect to mix in equal proportion the gentleman, the scholar, 
and the Christian; but, I know not how, the first ingredient 
is generally found to be the predominating dose in the com- 
position. He was engaged in gay parties, or with his courtly 
bow at some episcopal levee, when he should have been at- 
tending upon us. He had for many years the classical charge 

^ Antony and Cleopatra, iii. 2. 35-36. 

2 From Ben Jonson's Lines on Shakespeare. 



26 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

of a hundred children, during the four or five first years of 
their education ; and his very highest form seldom proceeded 
further than two or three of the introductory fables of 
Phsedrus. How things were suffered to go on thus, I cannot 
guess. Boyer, who was the proper person to have remedied 
these abuses, always affected, perhaps felt, a delicacy in 
interfering in a province not strictly his own. I have not 
been without my suspicions, that he was not altogether 
displeased at the contrast we presented to his end of the 
school. We were a sort of Helots to his young Spartans. He 
would sometimes, with ironic deference, send to borrow a rod 
of the Under Master, and then, with sardonic grin, observe 
to one of his upper boys, "how neat and fresh the twigs 
looked." While his pale students were battering their 
brains over Xenophon and Plato, with a silence as deep as 
that enjoined by the Samite, we were enjoying ourselves at 
our ease in our little Goshen. We saw a little into the secrets 
of his discipline, and the prospect did but the more reconcile 
us to our lot. His thunders rolled innocuous for us; his 
storms came near, but never touched us ; contrary to Gideon's 
miracle, while all around were drenched, our fleece was dry.^ 
His boys turned out the better scholars ; we, I suspect, have 
the advantage in temper. His pupils cannot speak of him 
without something of terror allaying their gratitude; the 
remembrance of Field comes back with all the soothing images 
of indolence, and summer slumbers, and work like play, and 
innocent idleness, and Elysian exemptions, and life itself a 
"playing holiday." ^ 

Though sufficiently removed from the jurisdiction of Boyer, 
we were near enough (as I have said) to understand a little 
of his system. We occasionally heard sounds of the Ulu- 
lantes, and caught glances of Tartarus. B. was a rabid 
pedant. His English style was crampt to barbarism. His 
Easter anthems (for his duty obliged him to those periodical 
flights) were grating as scrannel pipes. ^ — He would laugh — • 

1 Cowley. [Lamb's note.] 2 j Henry IV. i. 2. 227. 

^ In this and everything B. was the antipodes of his coadjutor. 
While the former was digging his brains for crude anthems, worth 



Christ's hospital 27 

ay, and heartily — but then it must be at Flaccus's quibble 
about Rex ^ — or at the tristis severitas in vultu,^ or inspicere 
in patinas,^ of Terence — thin jests, which at their first 
broaching could hardly have had vis enough to move a Roman 
muscle. — He had two wigs, both pedantic, but of different 
omen. The one serene, smiling, fresh powdered, betokening 
a mild day. The other, an old discolored, unkempt, angry 
caxon, denoting frequent and bloody execution. Woe to the 
school, when he made his morning appearance in his passy, 
or passionate wig. No comet expounded surer. — J. B. had 
a heavy hand. I have known him double his knotty fist 
at a poor trembling child (the maternal milk hardly dry 
upon its lips) with a "Sirrah, do you presume to set your 
wits at me ? " — Nothing was more common than to see 
him make a headlong entry into the schoolroom, from his 
inner recess, or library, and, with turbulent eye, singling out 
a lad, roar out, '^Od's my life,* sirrah" (his favorite adjura- 
tion), "I have a great mind to whip you," — then, with as 
sudden a retracting impulse, fling back into his lair — and, 
after a cooling lapse of some minutes (during which all but 
the culprit had totally forgotten the context), drive headlong 
out again, piecing out his imperfect sense, as if it had been 
some Devil's Litany, with the expletory yell — "and I will 
too.'' — In his gentler moods, when the rabidus furor ^ was 

a pig-nut, F. would be recreating his gentlemanly fancy in- the more 
flowery walks of the Muses. A little dramatic effusion of his, under 
the name of Vertumnus and Pomona, is not yet forgotten by the 
chroniclers of that sort of literature. It was accepted by Garrick, 
but the town did not give it their sanction. - — B. used to say of it 
in a way of half-compliment, half^rony, that it was too classical 
for representation. [Lamb's note.] 

^ Flaccus, i.e. Horace, in his Satires, Book I. vii. 33, plays on the 
word Hex, where the word has the double meaning of a "king" 
(the literal translation of the word) and also of an individual. 

2 Puritanic rigor in his countenance. 

^ To look into the stew-pans. In Terence's play entitled Adelphi, 
a father advises his son to look into the lives of men as into a mirror, 
and a slave, who hears the advice, counsels the kitchen scullions to 
look into the stew-pans as into a mirror. 

* As God is my life. ^ Raging frenzy or madness. 



28 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

assuaged, he had resort to an ingenious method, pecuUar, 
for what I have heard, to himself, of whipping the boy, and 
reading the Debates, at the same time; a paragraph, and 
a lash between; which in those times, when parliamentary 
oratory was most at a height and flourishing in these realms, 
was not calculated to impress the patient with a veneration 
for the diffuser graces of rhetoric. 

Once, and but once, the uplifted rod was known to fall 
ineffectual from his hand — when droll squinting W hav- 
ing been caught putting the inside of the master's desk to a 
use for which the architect had clearly not designed it, to 
justify himself, with great simplicity averred, that he did not 
know that the thing had been forewarned. This exquisite 
irrecognition of any law antecedent to the oral or declaratory, 
struck so irresistibly upon the fancy of all who heard it (the 
pedagogue himself not excepted) that remission was un- 
avoidable. 

L. has given credit to B.'s great merits as an instructor. 
Coleridge, in his literary life, has pronounced a more intelli- 
gible and ample encomium on them. The author of the 
Country Spectator doubts not to compare him with the ablest 
teachers of antiquity. Perhaps we cannot dismiss him better 

than with the pious ejaculation of C when he heard that 

his old master was on his death-bed: "Poor J. B. ! — may 
all his faults be forgiven ; and may he be wafted to bliss by 
little cherub boys, all head and wings, with no bottoms to 
reproach his sublunary infirmities." 

Under him were many good and sound scholars bred. 
— First Grecian of my time was Lancelot Pepys Stevens, 
kindest of boys and men, .since Co-grammar-master (and 

inseparable companion) with Dr. T e. What an edifying 

spectacle did this brace of friends present to those who re- 
membered the anti-socialities of their predecessors ! — You 
never met the one by chance in the street without a won- 
der, which was quickly dissipated by the almost immediate 
sub-appearance of the other. Generally arm-in-arm, these 
kindly coadjutors lightened for each other the toilsome duties 
of their profession, and when, in advanced age, one found it 



Christ's hospital 29 

convenient to retire, the other was not long in discovering 
that it suited him to lay down the fasces also. Oh, it is 
pleasant, as it is rare, to find the same arm linked in yours at 
forty, which at thirteen helped it to turn over the Cicero De 
Amicitia,^ or some tale of Antique Friendship, which the 
young heart even then was burning to anticipate ! — Co- 
Grecian with S. was Th , who has since executed with 

ability various diplomatic functions at the Northern courts. 

Th was a tall, dark, saturnine youth, sparing of speech, 

with raven locks. — Thomas Fanshaw Middleton followed 
him (now Bishop of Calcutta), a scholar and a gentleman 
in his teens. He has the reputation of an excellent critic; 
and is author (besides the Country Spectator) of a Treatise 
on the Greek Article, against Sharpe. — M. is said to bear his 
mitre high in India, where the regni novitas ^ (I dare say) 
sufficiently justifies the bearing. A humility quite as primi- 
tive as that of Jewel or Hooker might not be exactly fitted to 
impress the minds of those Anglo-Asiatic diocesans with a 
reverence for home institutions, and the church which those 
fathers watered. The manners of M. at school, though firm, 
were mild and unassuming. — Next to M. (if not senior to 
him) was Richards, author of the Aboriginal Britons, the 
most spirited of the Oxford Prize Poems; a pale, studious 

Grecian. — Then followed poor S , ill-fated M ! of 

these the Muse is silent. 

Finding some of Edward's race 
Unhappy, pass their annals by.^ 

Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day- 
spring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before 

1 Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 b.c.) was a Roman lawyer and 
orator who wrote a memorable essay entitled De Amicitia — On 
Friendship. 

2 From Vergil's Mneid, i. 563: 

"An infant realm and fortune hard 
Compel me thus my shores to guard." 
5 Prior's Carmen Secular e for 1700, stanza viii : 
"Finding some of Stuart's race 
Unhappy, pass their annals by." 



30 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

thee — the dark pillar not yet turned — Samuel Taylor 
Coleridge — Logician, Metaphysician, Bard ! — How have I 
seen the casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, en- 
tranced with admiration (while he weighed the dispropor- 
tion between the speech and the garh of the young Mirandula) , 
to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the 
mysteries of Jamblichus, or Plotinus (for even in those years 
thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts) , or recit- 
ing Homer in his Greek, or Pindar — while the walls of the 
old Grey Friars reechoed to the accents of the inspired 
charity-boy! — Many were the "wit-combats'' (to dally 
awhile with the words of old Fuller), between him and C. V. 

Le G , "which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon, 

and an English man of war : Master Coleridge, like the former, 
was built far higher in learning, solid, but slow in his per- 
formances. C. V. L., with the English man of war, lesser in 
bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack 
about, and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of 
his wit and invention." • 

Nor shalt thou, their compeer, be quickly forgotten, Allen, 
with the cordial smile, and still more cordial laugh, with which 
thou wert wont to make the old Cloisters shake, in thy cogni- 
tion of some poignant jest of theirs; or the anticipation of 
some more material, and peradventure practical one, of thine 
own. Extinct are those smiles, with that beautiful coun- 
tenance, with which (for thou wert the Nireus formosus ^ of 
the school), in the days of thy maturer waggery, thou didst 
disarm the wrath of infuriated town-damsel, who, incensed 
by provoking pinch, turning tigress-like round, suddenly con- 
verted by thy angel-look, exchanged the half-formed terrible 

"6Z ," for a gentler greeting — "bless thy handsome 

face ! " 

Next follow two, who ought to be now alive, and the friends 

of Elia — the junior Le G and F ; who impelled, 

the former by a roving temper, the latter by too quick a sense 

^ "Nireus, the most beauteous man that came up under Ilios of 
all the Danaans after the noble son of Peleus." — Homer's Iliad, 
ii. 673. Lang, Leaf, and Meyers' translation. 



THE TWO RACES OF MEN 31 

of neglect — ill capable of enduring the slights poor Sizars 
are sometimes subject to in our seats of learning — exchanged 
their Alma Mater for the camp ; perishing, one by climate, and 

one on the plains of Salamanca : — Le G , sanguine, 

volatile, sweet-natured ; F , dogged, faithful, anticipa- 

tive of insult, warm-hearted, with something of the old Roman 
height about him. 

Fine, frank-hearted Fr , the present master of Hertford, 

with Marmaduke T , mildest of Missionaries — and both 

my good friends still — close the catalogue of Grecians in 
my time. 



THE TWO RACES OF MEN 

The human species, according to the best theory I can 
form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who 
borrow, and the men who lend. To these two original diversi- 
ties may be reduced all those impertinent classifications of 
Gothic and Celtic tribes, white men, black men, red men. 
All the dwellers upon earth, "Parthians, and Medes, and 
Elamites,'' ^ flock hither, and do naturally fall in with one 
or other of these primary distinctions. The infinite superior- 
ity of the former, which I choose to designate as the great race, 
is discernible in their figure, port, and a certain instinctive 
sovereignty. The latter are born degraded. "He shall 
serve his brethren." ^ There is something in the air of one 
of this cast, lean and suspicious ; contrasting with the open, 
trusting, generous manners of the other. 

Observe who have been the greatest borrowers of all ages 
— Alcibiades — Falstaff — Sir Richard Steele — our late 
incomparable Brinsley — what a family likeness in all four ! 

What a careless, even deportment hath your borrower ! 
what rosy gills ! what a beautiful reliance on Providence 
doth he manifest, — taking no more thought than lilies ! 
What contempt for money, — accounting it (yours and mine 
especially) no better than dross ! ^hat a liberal confounding 

^ Acts ii. 9. ? Crenesim. Jx. 25. 



32 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

of those pedantic distinctions of meum and tuum ! or rather, 
what a noble simphfication of language (beyond Tooke), 
resolving these supposed opposites into one clear, intelligible 
pronoun adjective ! — What near approaches doth he make 
to the primitive community, — to the extent of one half of 
the principle at least ! — 

He is the true taxer who "calleth all the world up to be 
taxed;'' ^ and the distance is as vast between him and one 
of us, as subsisted between the Augustan Majesty and the 
poorest obolary Jew that paid it tribute-pittance at Jerusa- 
lem ! — His exactions, too, have such a cheerful, voluntary 
air! So far removed from your sour parochial or state- 
gatherers, — those ink-horn varlets, who carry their want of 
welcome in their faces ! He cometh to you with a smile, and 
troubleth you with no receipt ; confining himself to no set 
season. Every day is his Candlemas, or his feast of Holy 
Michael. He applieth the lene tormentum ^ of a pleasant look 
to your purse, — which to that gentle warmth expands her 
silken leaves, as naturally as the cloak of the traveler, for 
which sun and wind contended ! ^ He is the true Propontic 
which never ebbeth ! The sea which taketh handsomely at 
each man's hand. In vain the victim, whom he dehghteth 
to honor, struggles with destiny; he is in the net. Lend 
therefore cheerfully, man ordained to lend — that thou 
lose not in the end, with thy worldly penny, the reversion 
promised. Combine not preposterously in thine own person 
the penalties of Lazarus and of Dives ! — but, when thou 
seest the proper authority coming, meet it smilingly, as it were 
half-way. Come, a handsome sacrifice ! See how light he 
makes of it ! Strain not courtesies with a noble enemy. 

Reflections like the foregoing were forced upon my mind 
by the death of my old friend, Ralph Bigod, Esq., who parted 

^ Luke ii. 1. 

2 A gentle or mild stimulus ; so used by Horace, where the expres- 
sion is descriptive of the influence of wine. 

3 In iE sop's fable the Sun and the Wind contend with a traveler 
to take off his cloak. The Wind only makes the traveler wrap his 
cloak the closer; the warm Sun, however, causes him to doff it. 



THE TWO RACES OF MEN 33 

this life on Wednesday evening ; dying, as he had hved, with- 
out much trouble. He boasted himself a descendant from 
mighty ancestors of that name, who heretofore held ducal 
dignities in this realm. In his actions and sentiments he be- 
lied not the stock to which he pretended. Early in life he 
found himself invested with ample revenues ; which, with 
that noble disinterestedness which I have noticed as inherent 
in men of the great race, he took almost immediate measures 
entirely to dissipate and bring to nothing : for there is some- 
thing revolting in the idea of a king holding a private purse ; 
and the thoughts of Bigod were all regal. Thus furnished, 
by the very act of disf urnishment ; getting rid of the cumber- 
some luggage of riches, more apt (as one sings) 

To slacken virtue, and abate her edge. 

Than prompt her to do aught may merit praise,^ 

he set forth, like some Alexander, upon his great enterprise, 
"borrowing and to borrow!" 

In his periegesis, or triumphant progress throughout this 
island, it has been calculated that he laid a tythe part of the 
inhabitants under contribution. I reject this estimate as 
greatly exaggerated : — but having had the honor of ac- 
companying my friend, divers times, in his perambulations 
about this vast city, I own I was greatly struck at first with 
the prodigious number of faces we met, who claimed a sort of 
respectful acquaintance with us. He was one day so oblig- 
ing as to explain the phenomenon. It seems, these were his 
tributaries; feeders of his exchequer; gentlemen, his good 
friends (as he was pleased to express himself) , to whom he had 
occasionally been beholden for a loan. Their multitudes 
did no way disconcert him. He rather took a pride in 
numbering them; and, with Comus, seemed pleased to be 
"stocked with so fair a herd." ^ 

With such sources, it was a wonder how he contrived to 
keep his treasury always empty. He did it by force of an 
aphorism, which he had often in his mouth, that "money 
kept longer than three days stinks." So he made use of it 

^ Paradise Regained, ii. 455. . ^ Comus, 151-153. 



34 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

while it was fresh. A good part he drank away (for he was 
an excellent toss-pot), some he gave away, the rest he threw 
away, literally tossing and hurling it violently from him — 
as boys do burrs, or as if it had been infectious, — into ponds, 
or ditches, or deep holes, inscrutable cavities of the earth ; — 
or he would bury it (where he would never seek it again) 
by a river's side under some bank, which (he would facetiously 
observe) paid no interest — but out away from him it must 
go peremptorily, as Hagar's offspring into the wilderness, 
while it was sweet. He never missed it. The streams were 
perennial which fed his fisc. When new supplies became 
necessary, the first person that had the felicity to fall in with 
him, friend or stranger, was sure to contribute to the deficiency. 
For Bigod had an undeniable way with him. He had a 
cheerful, open exterior, a quick jovial eye, a bald forehead, 
just touched with grey {cana fides ^). He anticipated no 
excuse, and found none. And, waiving for a while my theory 
as to the great race, I would put it to the most untheorizing 
reader, who may at times have disposable coin in his pocket, 
whether it is not more repugnant to the kindliness of his 
nature to refuse such a one as I am describing, than to say no 
to a poor petitionary rogue (your bastard borrower), who, by 
his mumping visnomy, tells you that he expects nothing 
better; and, therefore, whose preconceived notions and 
expectations you do in reality so much less shock in the 
refusal. 

When I think of this man ; his fiery glow of heart ; his swell 
of feeling ; how magnificent, how ideal he was ; how great at 
the midnight hour ; and when I compare with him the com- 
panions with whom I have associated since, I grudge the 
saving of a few idle ducats, and think that I am fallen into 
the society of lenders, and little men. 

To one like Elia, whose treasures are rather cased in leather 
covers than closed in iron coffers, there is a class of alienators 
more formidable than that which I have touched upon; I 
mean your borrowers of books — those mutilators of collec- 
tions, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd 

^ The honor due to gray hairs. Vergil's JEneid, i. 292. 



THE TWO RACES OF MEN 35 

volumes. There is Comberbatch, matchless in his depreda- 
tions ! 

That foul gap in the bottom shelf facing you, like a great 
eye-tooth knocked out — (you are now with me in my little 
back study in Bloomsbury, Reader !) — with the huge 
Switzer-like tomes on each side (hke the Guildhall giants, in 
their reformed posture, guardant of nothing) once held the 
tallest of my folios, Opera Bonaventurce,^ choice and massy 
divinity, to which its two supporters (school divinity also, 
but of a lesser calibre, — Bellarmine, and Holy Thomas) 
showed but as dwarfs, — itself an Ascapart ! — that Comber- 
batch abstracted upon the faith of a theory he holds, which 
is more easy, I confess, for me to suffer by than to refute, 
namely, that "the title to property in a book" (my Bona- 
venture, for instance) " is in exact ratio to the claimant's 
powers of understanding and appreciating the same." 
Should he go on acting upon this theory, which of our 
shelves is safe ? 

The slight vacuum in the left-hand case — two shelves 
from the ceiling — scarcely distinguishable but by the quick 
eye of a loser — was whilom the commodious resting-place 
of Browne on Urn Burial. C. will hardly allege that he 
knows more about that treatise than I do, who introduced it 
to him, and was indeed the first (of the moderns) to discover 
its beauties — but so have I known a foolish lover to praise 
his mistress in the presence of a rival more qualified to carry 
her off than himself. — Just below, Dodsley's dramas want 
their fourth volume, where Vittoria Corombona is ! The 
remainder nine are as distasteful as Priam's refuse sons, 
when the Fates borrowed Hector. Here stoqd the Anatomy 
of Melancholy, in sober state. — There loitered the Complete 
Angler; quiet as in life, by some stream side. In yonder 
nook, John Buncle, a widower- volume, with "eyes closed," 
mourns his ravished mate. 

One justice I must do my friend, that if he sometimes, 
like the sea, sweeps away a treasure, at another time, sea- 
like, he throws up as rich an equivalent to match it. I 

1 The works of St. Bonaventura, the ' Seraphic Doctor.' 



36 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

have a small under-collection of this nature (my friend's 
gatherings in his various calls), picked up, he has forgotten 
at what odd places, and deposited with as little memory at 
mine. I take in these orphans, the twice-deserted. These 
proselytes of the gate are welcome as the true Hebrews. 
There they stand in conjunction; natives, and naturalized. 
The latter seem as Httle disposed to inquire out their true 
lineage as I am. — I charge no warehouse-room for these 
deodands, nor shall ever put myself to the ungentlemanly 
trouble of advertising a sale of them to pay expenses. 

To lose a volume to C. carries some sense and meaning 
in it. You are sure that he will make one hearty meal 
on your viands, if he can give no account of the platter after 
it. But what moved thee, wayward, spiteful K,, to be so 
importunate to carry off with thee, in spite of tears and 
adjurations to thee to forbear, the Letters of that princely 
woman, the thrice noble Margaret Newcastle ? — knowing 
at the time, and knowing that I knew also, thou most as- 
suredly wouldst never turn over one leaf of the illustrious 
folio : — what but the mere spirit of contradiction, and 
childish love of getting the better of thy friend ? — Then, 
worst cut of all! to transport it with thee to the Galilean 
land — 

Unworthy land to harbor such a sweetness, 

A virtue in which all ennobling thoughts dwelt. 

Pure thoughts, kind thoughts, high thoughts, her sex's wonder I 

hadst thou not thy play-books, and books of jests and 



fancies, about thee, to keep thee merry, even as thou keepest 
all companies with thy quips and mirthful tales? Child 
of the Green-room, it was unkindly done of thee. Thy wife, 
too, that part-French, better-part-Enghshwoman ! — that 
she could fix upon no other treatise to bear away, in kindly 
token of remembering us, than the works of Fulke Greville, 
Lord Brook — of which no Frenchman, nor woman of 
France, Italy, or England, was ever by nature constituted to 
comprehend a tittle ! Was there not Zimmerman on Soli- 
tude P 



NEW year's eve 37 

Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a moderate collec- 
tion, be shy of showing it ; or if thy heart overfloweth to lend 
them, lend thy books; but let it be to such a one as S. T. C. 
— he will return them (generally anticipating the time ap- 
pointed) with usury; enriched with annotations, tripling 
their value. I have had experience. Many are these pre- 
cious MSS. of his — (in matter oftentimes, and almost in quan- 
tity not unfrequently, vying with the originals) in no very 
clerkly hand — legible in my Daniel; in old Burton; in Sir 
Thomas Browne; and those abstruser cogitations of the 
.Greville, now, alas ! wandering in Pagan lands. — I counsel 
thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library, against S. T. C. 



NEW YEAR'S EVE 

Every man hath two birth-days : two days at least, in 
every year, which set him upon revolving the lapse of time, 
as it affects his mortal duration. The one is that which in an 
especial mannel' he termeth his. In the gradual desuetude of 
old observances, this custom of solemnizing our proper birth- 
day hath nearly passed away, or is left to children, who re- 
flect nothing at all about the matter, nor understand anything 
in it beyond cake and orange. But the birth of a New Year 
is of an interest too wide to be pretermitted by king or 
cobbler. No one ever regarded the First of January with 
indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and 
count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common 
Adam. 

Of all sound of all bells — (bells, the music nighest border- 
ing upon heaven) — most solemn and touching is the peal 
which rings out the Old Year. I never hear it without a 
gathering-up of my mind to a concentration of all the images 
that have been diffused over the past twelvemonth; all I 
have done or suffered, performed or neglected, in that 
regretted time. I begin to know its worth, as when a person 



38 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

dies. It takes a personal color ; nor was it a poetical flight 
in a contemporary, when he exclaimed — 

I saw the skirts of the departing Year/ 

It is no more than what in sober sadness every one of us 
seems to be conscious of, in that awful leave-taking. I am 
sure I felt it, and all felt it with me, last night ; though some 
of my companions affected rather to manifest an exhilara- 
tion at the birth of the coming year, than any very tender 
regrets for the decease of its predecessor. But I am none 
of those who — 

Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.^ 

I am naturally, beforehand, shy of novelties; new books, 
new faces, new years, — from some mental twist which makes 
it difficult in me to face the prospective. I have almost 
ceased to hope; and am sanguine only in the prospects of 
other (former years). I plunge into foregone visions and 
conclusions. I encounter pell-mell with past disappoint- 
ments. I am armor-proof against old discouragements. I 
forgive, or overcome in fancy, old adversaries. I play over 
again for love, as the gamesters phrase it, games for which I 
once paid so dear. I would scarce now have any of those 
untoward accidents and events of my life reversed. I would 
no more alter them than the incidents of some well-contrived 
novel. Methinks, it is better that I should have pined away 
seven of my goldenest years, when I was thrall to the fair 
hair, and fairer eyes, of Alice W n, than that so passion- 
ate a love adventure should be lost. It was better that our 
family should have missed that legacy, which old Dorrell 
cheated us of, than that I should have at this moment two 
thousand pounds in banco,^ and be without the idea of that 
specious old rogue. 

In a degree beneath manhood, it is my infirmity to look 

* Coleridge's Ode to the Departing Year, 1796. 

2 Pope's Homer's Odyssey, xvi. 84. 

^ Italian. Literally, in the bank ; standing to my credit. 



NEW year's eve 39 

back upon those early days. Do I advance a paradox when 
I say that, skipping over the intervention of forty years, a 
man may have leave to love himself, without the imputation 
of self-love ? 

If I know aught of myself, no one whose mind is intro- 
spective — and mine is painfully so — can have a less respect 
for his present identity than I have for the man Elia. I 
know him to be light, and vain, and humorsome ; a noto- 
rious . . . ; addicted to . . . ; averse from counsel, neither 
taking it, nor offering it ; — . . . besides ; a stammering 
buffoon; what you will; lay it on, and spare not; I sub- 
scribe to it all, and much more, than thou canst be willing 
to lay at his door — but for the child Elia — that " other me," 
there, in the background — I must take leave to cherish the 
remembrance of that young master — with as little reference, 
I protest, to this stupid changeling of five-and-forty, as if it 
had been a child of some other house, and not of my parents. 
I can cry over its patient small-pox at five, and rougher 
medicaments. I can lay its poor fevered head upon the sick 
pillow at Christ's, and wake with it in surprise at the gentle 
posture of maternal tenderness hanging over it, that un- 
known had watched its sleep. I know how it shrank from 
any the least color of falsehood. — God help thee, Elia, how 
art thou changed ! — Thou art sophisticated. — I know how 
honest, how courageous (for a weakling) it was — how reli- 
gious, how imaginative, how hopeful ! From what have I 
not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself, — and 
not some dissembling guardian, presenting a false identity, 
to give the rule to my unpractised steps, and regulate the 
tone of my moral being ! 

That I am fond of indulging, beyond a hope of sympathy, 
in such retrospection, may be the symptom of some sickly 
idiosyncrasy. Or is it owing to another cause : simply, that 
being without wife or family, I have not learned to project 
myself enough out of myself ; and having no offspring of my 
own to dally with, I turn back upon memory, and adopt my 
own early idea, as my heir and favorite ? If these specula- 
tions seem fantastical to thee, Reader (a busy man, per- 



40 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

chance), if I tread out of the way of thy sympathy, and am 
singularly conceited only, I retire, impenetrable to ridicule, 
under the phantom cloud of Elia. 

The elders, with whom I was brought up, were of a charac- 
ter not likely to let slip the sacred observance of any old 
institution; and the ringing out of the Old Year was kept 
by them with circumstances of peculiar ceremony. — In 
those days the sound of those midnight chimes, though it 
seemed to raise hilarity in all around me, never failed to 
bring a train of pensive imagery into my fancy. Yet I then 
scarce conceived what it meant, or thought of it as a reckon- 
ing that concerned me. Not childhood alone, but the young 
man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He 
knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily 
on the fragility of life ; but he brings it not home to himself, 
any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagi- 
nation the freezing days of December. But now, shall I con- 
fess a truth ? — I feel these audits but too powerfully. I 
begin to count the probabilities of my duration, and to grudge 
at the expenditure of moments and shortest periods, like 
misers' farthings. In proportion as the years both lessen 
and shorten, I set more count upon their periods, and would 
fain lay my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great 
wheel. I am not content to pass away ^' like 'a weaver's 
shuttle." ^ Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten 
the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be 
carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to 
eternity; and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I 
am in love with this green earth ; the face of town and coun- 
try ; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security 
of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. I am con- 
tent to stand still at the age to which I am arrived ; I, and my 
friends : to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do 
not want to be weaned by age ; or drop, like mellow fruit, as 
they say, into the grave. — Any alteration, on this earth of 
mine, in diet or in lodging, puzzles and discomposes me. My 
household gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and are not rooted 

1 Job vii. 6. 



NEW year's eve 41 

up without blood. They do not willingly seek Lavinian 
shores. A new state of being staggers me. 

Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer 
holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices 
of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and 
candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vani- 
ties, and jests, and irony itself — do these things go out with 
life? 

Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are 
pleasant with him? 

And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios; must I part 
with the intense delight of having you (huge armfuls) in my 
embraces? Must knowledge come to me, if it come at all, 
by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by 
this familiar process of reading ? 

Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting the smiling indi- 
cations which point me to them here, — the recognizable 
face — the " sweet assurance of a look ? " ^ 

In winter this intolerable disinchnation to dying — to give 
it its mildest name — does more especially haunt and beset 
me. In a genial August noon, beneath a sweltering sky, 
death is almost problematic. At those times do such poor 
snakes as myself enjoy an immortality. Then we expand and 
burgeon. Then we are as strong again, as valiant again, as 
wise again, and a great deal taller. The blast that nips and 
shrinks me, puts me in thoughts of death. All things allied 
to the insubstantial, wait upon that master feeling; cold, 
numbness, dreams, perplexity; moonlight itself, with its 
shadowy and spectral appearances, — that cold ghost of the 
sun, or Phoebus's sickly sister, like that innutritions one de- 
nounced in the Canticles : — I am none of her minions — I 
hold with the Persian.^ 

Whatsoever thwarts, or puts me out of my way, brings 



^ Adapted from Roydon's Elegy on Sir Philip Sidney: 

"A sweet attractive kind of grace, 
A full assurance given by looks." 

2 Sun-worship had its origin in Persia. 



42 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

death, unto my mind. All partial evils, like humors, run 
into that capital plague-sore. — I have heard some profess 
an indifference to life. Such hail the end of their existence 
as a port of refuge; and speak of the grave as of some soft 
arms, in which they may slumber as on a pillow. Some have 

wooed death but out upon thee, I say, thou foul, ugly 

phantom ! I detest, abhor, execrate, and (with Friar John) 
give thee to six-score thousand devils, as in no instance to be 
excused or tolerated, but shunned as a universal viper; to 
be branded, proscribed, and spoken evil of ! In no way can 
I be brought to digest thee, thou thin, melancholy Privation, 
or more frightful and confounding Positive ! 

Those antidotes, prescribed against the fear of thee, are 
altogether frigid and insulting, like thyself. For what satis- 
faction hath a man, that he shall ''lie down with kings and 
emperors in death," who in his lifetime never greatly coveted 
the society of such bed-fellows? — or, forsooth, that "so 
shall the fairest face appear"? — why, to comfort me, must 

AHce W n be a goblin ? More than all, I conceive disgust 

at those impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed 
upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must 
take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, 
that " Such as he now is, I must shortly be." Not so shortly, 
friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. In the meantime I am 
alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know 
thy betters ! Thy New Years' Days are past. I survive, a 
jolly candidate for 1821. Another cup of wine — and while 
that turn-coat bell, that just now mournfully chanted the 
obsequies of 1820 departed, with changed notes lustily rings 
in a successor, let us attune to its peal the song made on a like 
occasion, by hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton. 



THE NEW YEAR 

Hark, the cock crows, and yon bright star 
Tells us the day himself 's not far; 
And see where, breaking from the night, 
He gilds the western hills with light. 



NEW year's eve 43 

With him old Janus doth appear, 

Peeping into the future year, 

With such a look as seems to say 

The prospect is not good that way. 

Thus do we rise ill sights to see, 

And 'gainst ourselves to prophesy; 

When the prophetic fear of things 

A more tormenting mischief brings, 

More full of soul-tormenting gall 

Than direst mischiefs can befall. 

But stay ! but stay I methinks my sight, 

Better informed by clearer light, 

Discerns sereneness in that brow 

That all contracted seemed but now. 

His re vers' d face may show distaste, 

And frown upon the ills are past; 

But that which this way looks is clear, 

And smiles upon the New-born Year. 

He looks too from a place so high. 

The Year lies open to his eye; 

And all the moments open are 

To the exact discoverer. 

Yet more and more he smiles upon 

The happy revolution. 

Why should we then suspect or fear 

The influences of a year, 

So smiles upon us the first mom. 

And speaks us good so soon as born? 

Plague on't ! the last was ill enough, 

This cannot but make better proof; 

Or, at the worst, as we brush'd through 

The last, why so we may this too; 

And then the next in reason should 

Be superexcellently good: 

For the worst ills (we daily see) 

Have no more perpetuity 

Than the best fortunes that do fall; 

Which also bring us wherewithal 

Longer their being to support. 

Than those do of the other sort: 

And who has one good year in three. 

And yet repines at destiny, 

Appears ungrateful in the case, 

And merits not the good he has. 

Then let us welcome the New Guest 

With lusty brimmers of the best: 

Mirth always should Good Fortune meet. 

And render e'en Disaster sweet: 



44 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

And though the Princess turn her back, 
Let us but hne ourselves with sack, 
We better shall by far hold out, 
Till the next Year she face about. 

How say you, Reader — do not these verses smack of the 
rough magnanimity of the old English vein? Do they not 
fortify like a cordial ; enlarging the heart, and productive of 
sweet blood, and generous spirits, in the concoction ? Where 
be those puling fears of death, just now expressed or affected ? 
— Passed like a cloud — absorbed in the purging sunlight of 
clear poetry — clean washed away by a wave of genuine 
Helicon, your only Spa for these hypochondries. And now 
another cup of the generous ! and a merry New Year, and 
many of them, to you all, my masters ! 



MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST 

"A CLEAR fire, a clean hearth,* and the rigor of the game." 
This was the celebrated wish of old Sarah Battle (now with 
God), who, next to her devotions, loved a good game of whist. 
She was none of your lukewarm gamesters, your half-and- 
half players, who have no objection to take a hand, if you 
want one to make up a rubber ; who affirm that they have no 
pleasure in winning ; that they like to win one game and lose 
another; that they can while away an hour very agreeably 
at a card-table, but are indifferent whether they play or no ; 
and will desire an adversary, who has slipped a wrong card, 
to take it up and play another.^ These insufferable triflers 
are the curse of a table. One of these flies will spoil a whole 
pot. Of such it may be said that they do not play at cards, 
but only play at playing at them. 

Sarah Battle was none of that breed. She detested them, 

^ This was before the introduction of rugs, Reader. You must 
remember the intolerable crash of the unswept cinders betwixt your 
foot and the marble. [Lamb's note.] 

2 As if a sportsman should tell you he liked to kill a fox one day 
and lose him the next. [Lamb's note.] 



S 



MRS. battle's opinions ON WHIST 45 

as I do, from her heart and soul ; and would not, save upon a 
striking emergency, willingly seat herself at the same table 
with them. She loved a thorough-paced partner, a deter- 
mined enemy. She took, and gave, no concessions. She 
hated favors. She never made a revoke, nor ever passed 
it over in her adversary without exacting the utmost for- 
feiture. She fought a good fight : cut and thrust. She held 
not her good sword (her cards) "like a dancer." She sat 
bolt upright ; and neither showed you her cards, nor desired 
to see yours. All people have their blind side — their super- 
stitions; and I have heard her declare, under the rose, that 
Hearts was her favorite suit. 

I never in my life — and I knew Sarah Battle many of the 
best years of it — saw her take out her snuff-box when it was 
her turn to play ; or snuff a candle in the middle of a game ; 
or ring for a servant, till it was fairly over. She never intro- 
duced, or connived at, miscellaneous conversation during its 
process. As she emphatically observed, cards were cards; 
and if I ever saw unmingled distaste in her fine last-century 
countenance, it was at the airs of a young gentleman of a 
literary turn, who had been with difficulty persuaded to take 
a hand ; and who, in his excess of candor, declared, that he 
thought there was no harm in unbending the mind now and 
then, after serious studies, in recreations of that kind ! She 
could not bear to have her noble occupation, to which she 
wound up her faculties, considered in that light. It was her 
business, her duty, the thing she came into the world to do, 
— and she did it. She unbent her mind afterwards — over 
a book. 

Pope was her favorite author : his Rape of the Lock her 
favorite work. She once did me the favor to play over 
with me (with the cards) his celebrated game of Ombre in 
that poem ; and to explain to me how far it agreed with, and 
in what points it would be found to differ from, tradrille. 
Her illustrations were apposite and poignant ; and I had the 
pleasure of sending the substance of them to Mr. Bowles; 
but I suppose they came too late to be inserted among hia 
ingenious notes upon that author. 



46 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

Quadrille, she has often told me, was her first love; but 
whist had engaged her maturer esteem. The former, she 
said, was showy and specious, and likely to allure young 
persons. The uncertainty and quick shifting of partners — 
a thing which the constancy of whist abhors; the dazzling 
supremacy and regal investiture of Spadille — absurd, as 
she justly observed, in the pure aristocracy of whist, where 
his crown and garter give him no proper power above his 
brother-nobility of the Aces ; — the giddy vanity, so taking 
to the inexperienced, of playing alone; above all, the over- 
powering attractions of a Sans Prendre Vole,^ — to the tri- 
umph of which there is certainly nothing parallel or approach- 
ing, in the contingencies of whist ; — all these, she would say, 
make quadrille a game of captivation to the young and en- 
thusiastic. But whist was the solider game : that was her 
word. It was a long meal; not, like quadrille, a feast of 
snatches. One or two rubbers might co-extend in duration 
with an evening. They gave time to form rooted friendships, 
to cultivate steady enmities. She despised the chance- 
started, capricious, and ever-fluctuating alliances of the other. 
The skirmishes of quadrille, she would say, reminded her of 
the petty ephemeral embroilments of the little Itahan states, 
depicted by Machiavel: perpetually changing postures and 
connections ; bitter foes to-day, sugared darlings to-morrow ; 
kissing and scratching in a breath ; — but the wars of whist 
were comparable to the long, steady, deep-rooted, rational 
antipathies of the great French and English nations. 

A grave simplicity was what she chiefly admired in her 
favorite game. There was nothing silly in it, like the nob 
in cribbage — nothing superfluous. No flushes — that most 
irrational of all pleas that a reasonable being can set up : — 
that any one should claim four by virtue of holding cards 
of the same mark and color, without reference to. the play- 
ing of the game, or the individual worth or pretensions of the 
cards themselves ! She held this to be a solecism ; as pitiful 
an ambition at cards as alliteration is in authorship. She 
despised superficiality, and looked deeper than the colors of 

* See Quadrille in the Explanatory Index. 



MRS. battle's opinions ON WHIST 47 

things. — Suits were soldiers, she would say, and must have 
a uniformity of array to distinguish them : but what should 
we say to a foolish squire, who should claim a merit from 
dressing up his tenantry in red jackets, that never were to be 
marshalled — never to take the field ? — She even wished 
that whist were more simple than it is; and, in my mind, 
would have stripped it of some appendages, which, in the 
state of human frailty, may be venially, and even commend- 
ably, allowed of. She saw no reason for the deciding of the 
trump by the turn of the card. Why not one suit always 
trumps ? — Why two colors, when the mark of the suits 
would have sufficiently distinguished them without it ? 

" But the eye, my dear madam, is agreeably refreshed with 
the variety. Man is not a creature of pure reason — he must 
have his senses delightfully appealed to. We see it in Roman 
Catholic countries, where the music and the paintings draw 
in many to worship, whom your quaker spirit of unsensualiz- 
ing would have kept out. — You yourself have a pretty col- 
lection of paintings — but confess to me, whether, walking 
in your gallery at Sandham, among those clear Vandykes, 
or among the Paul Potters in the ante-room, you ever felt 
your bosom glow with an elegant delight, at all comparable 
to that you have it in your power to experience most evenings 
over a well-arranged assortment of the court-cards ? — the 
pretty antic habits, like heralds in a procession — the gay 
triumph-assuring scarlets — the contrasting deadly-killing 
sables — the 'hoary majesty of spades' — Pam in all his 
glory! — 

"All these might be dispensed with; and with their naked 
names upon the drab pasteboard, the game might go on very 
well, pictureless; but the beauty of cards would be extin- 
guished for ever. Stripped of all that is imaginative in them, 
they must degenerate into mere gambling. Imagine a dull 
deal-board, or drum head, to spread them on, instead of that 
nice verdant carpet (next to nature's), fittest arena for those 
courtly combatants to play their gallant jousts and turneys 
in ! — Exchange those delicately-turned ivory markers — 
(work of Chinese artist, unconscious of their symbol, — or 



48 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

as profanely slighting their true application as the arrantest 
Ephesian journeyman that turned out those little shrines for 
the goddess) — exchange them for little bits of leather (our 
ancestors' money) or chalk and a slate \" — 

The old lady, with a smile, confessed the soundness of my 
logic; and to her approbation of my arguments on her 
favorite topic that evening, I have always fancied myself 
indebted for the legacy of a curious cribbage-board, made 
of the finest Sienna marble, which her maternal uncle (old 
Walter Plumer, whom I have elsewhere celebrated) brought 
with him from Florence : — this, and a trifle of five hundred 
pounds, came to me at her death. 

The former bequest (which I do not least value) I have 
kept with religious care; though she herself, to confess a 
truth, was never greatly taken with cribbage. It was an 
essentially vulgar game, I have heard her say, — disputing 
with her uncle, who was very partial to it. She could never 
heartily bring her mouth to pronounce "Go," ^ or "That's a 
go." ^ She called it an ungrammatical game. The pegging 
teased her. I once knew her to forfeit a rubber (a five-dollar 
stake) because she would not take advantage of the turn-up 
knave, which would have given it her, but which she must 
have claimed by the disgraceful tenure of declaring "tivofor 
his heels." ^ There is something extremely genteel in this 
sort of self-denial. Sarah Battle was a gentlewoman born. 

Piquet she held the best game at the cards for two persons, 
though she would ridicule the pedantry of the terms — such 
as pique — repique — the capot — they savored (she 
thought) of affectation. But games for two, or even three, 
she never greatly cared for. She loved the quadrate, or 
square. She would argue thus : - — Cards are warfare : the 
ends are gain, with glory. But cards are war, in disguise of a 
sport : when single adversaries encounter, the ends proposed 
are too palpable. By themselves,' it is too close a fight ; with 
spectators, it is not much bettered. No looker-on can be 
interested, except for a bet, and then it is a mere affair of 
money; he cares not for your luck sympathetically, or for 

^ See Cribbage in the Explanatory Index. 



MRS. battle's opinions ON WHIST 49 

your play. — Three are still worse ; a mere naked war of 
every man against every man, as in cribbage, without league 
or alliance ; or a rotation of petty and contradictory interests, 
a succession of heartless leagues, and not much more hearty 
infractions of them, as in tradrille. — But in square games 
(she meant whist), all that is possible to be attained in card- 
playing is accomplished. There are the incentives of profit 
with honor, common to every species — though the latter 
can be but very imperfectly enjoyed in those other games, 
where the spectator is only feebly a participator. But the 
parties in whist are spectators and principals too. They are 
a theatre to themselves, and a looker-on is not wanted. He 
is rather worse than nothing, and an impertinence. Whist 
abhors neutrality, or interests beyond its sphere. You glory 
in some surprising stroke of skill or fortune, not because a 
cold — or even an interested — bystander witnesses it, but 
because your partner sympathizes in the contingency. You 
win for two. You triumph for two. Two are exalted. Two 
again are mortified ; which divides their disgrace, as the con- 
junction doubles (by taking off the invidiousness) your glories. 
Two losing to two are better reconciled, than one to one in 
that close butchery. The hostile feeling is weakened by mul- 
tiplying the channels. War becomes a civil game. By 
such reasonings as these the old lady was accustomed to de- 
fend her favorite pastime. 

No inducement could ever prevail upon her to play at any 
game, where chance entered into the composition, for nothing. 
Chance, she would argue — and here again, admire the sub- 
tlety of her conclusion; — chance is nothing, but where some- 
thing else depends upon it. It is obvious that cannot be 
glory. What rational cause of exultation could it give to a 
man to turn up size ace a hundred times together by himself ? 
or before spectators, where no stake was depending ? — 
Make a lottery of a hundred thousand tickets with but one 
fortunate number — and what possible principle of our 
nature, except stupid wonderment, could it gratify to gain 
that number as many times successively, without a prize? 
Therefore she disliked the mixture of chance in backgammon, 



50 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

where it was not played for money. She called it foolish, 
and those people idiots, who were taken with a lucky hit 
under such circumstances. Games of pure skill were as little 
to her fancy. Played for a stake, they were a mere system 
of over-reaching. Played for glory, they were a mere setting 
of one man's wit, — his memory, or combination-faculty 
rather — against another's; like a mock-engagement at a 
review, bloodless and profitless. She could not conceive a 
game wanting the spritely infusion of chance, the handsome 
excuses of good fortune. Two people playing at chess in a 
corner of a room, whilst whist was stirring in the centre, would 
inspire her with insufferable horror and ennui. Those well- 
cut similitudes of Castles and Knights, the imagery of the 
board, she would argue (and I think in this case justly), were 
entirely misplaced and senseless. Those hard head-contests 
can in no instance ally with the fancy. They reject form 
and color. A pencil and dry slate (she used to say) were 
the proper arena for such combatants. 

To those puny objectors against cards, as nurturing the 
bad passions, she would retort that man is a gaming animal. 
He must be always trying to get the better in something or 
other : — that this passion can scarcely be more safely ex- 
pended than upon a game at cards : that cards are a tem- 
porary illusion; in truth, a mere drama; for we do but 
play at being mightily concerned, where a few idle shillings 
are at stake, yet, during the illusion, we are as mightily con- 
cerned as those whose stake is crowns and kingdoms. They 
are a sort of dream-fighting ; much ado ; great battling and 
little bloodshed; mighty means for disproportioned ends: 
quite as diverting, and a great deal more innoxious, than 
many of those more serious games of life, which men play 
without esteeming them to be such. 

With great deference to the old lady's judgment on these 
matters, I think I have experienced some moments in my 
life when playing at cards /or nothing has even been agreeable. 
When I am in sickness, or not in the best spirits, I sometimes 
call for the cards, and play a game at piquet for love with my 
cousin Bridget — Bridget Elia. 



A CHAPTER ON EARS 51 

I grant there is something sneaking in it : but with a tooth- 
ache, or a sprained ankle, — when you are subdued and 
humble, — you are glad to put up with an inferior spring of 
action. 

There is such a thing in nature, I am convinced, as sick 
whist. 

I grant it is not the highest style of man — I deprecate 
the manes of Sarah Battle — she lives not, alas ! to whom I 
should apologize. 

At such times, those terms which my old friend objected 
to, come in as something admissible — I love to get a tierce 
or a quatorze, though they mean nothing. I am subdued to 
an inferior interest. Those shadows of winning amuse me. 

That last game I had with my sweet cousin (I capotted ^ 
her) — (dare I tell thee, how foolish I am ?) — I wished it 
might have lasted for ever, though we gained nothing, and 
lost nothing, though it was a mere shade of play : I would be 
content to go on in that idle folly for ever. The pipkin should 
be ever boiling, that was to prepare the gentle lenitive to my 
foot, which Bridget was doomed to apply after the game was 
over : and, as I do not much relish appliances, there it should 
ever bubble. Bridget and I should be ever playing. 



A CHAPTER ON EARS 

I HAVE no ear. — 

Mistake me not. Reader — nor imagine that I am by nature 
destitute of those exterior twin appendages, hanging orna- 
ments, and (architecturally speaking) handsome volutes to 
the human capital. Better my mother had never borne me. 
— I am, I think, rather delicately than copiously provided 
with those conduits; and I feel no disposition to envy the 
mule for his plenty, or the mole for her exactness, in those 
ingenious labyrinthine inlets — those indispensable side- 
intelligencers. 

^ Won all the tricks, thus adding forty points to the score. 



52 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A 

Neither have I incurred, or done anything to incur, with 
Defoe, that hideous disfigurement, which constrained him 
to draw upon assurance — to feel "quite unabashed,"^ and 
at ease upon that article. . I was never, I thank my stars, 
in the pillory ; nor, if I read them aright, is it within the com- 
pass of my destiny, that I ever should be. 

When therefore I say that I have no ear, you will under- 
stand me to mean — for music. To say that this heart never 
melted at the concord of sweet sounds, would be a foul self- 
libel. "Water parted from the sea" ^ never fails to move it 
strangely. So does "In infancy." ^ But they were used to 
be sung at her harpsichord (the old-fashioned instrument in 
vogue in those days) by a gentlewoman — the gentlest, sure, 
that ever merited the appellation — the sweetest — why 

should I hesitate to name Mrs. S , once the blooming 

Fanny Weatheral of the Temple — who had power to thrill 
the soul of Elia, small imp as he was, even in his long coats ; 
and to make him glow, tremble, and blush with a passion, 
that not faintly indicated the day-spring of that absorbing 
sentiment, which was afterwards destined to overwhelm and 
subdue his nature quite, for Alice W n. 

I even think that sentimentally I am disposed to harmony. 
But organically I am incapable of a tune. I have been prac- 
tising "God save the King " all my life ; whistling and humming 
of it over to myself in solitary corners; and am not yet ar- 
rived, they tell me, within many quavers of it. Yet hath the 
loyalty of Eha never been impeached. 

1 am not without suspicion that I have an undeveloped 
faculty of music within me. For thrumming, in my wild 
way, on my friend A.'s piano, the other morning, while he 
was engaged in an adjoining parlor, — on his return he was 
pleased to say, "he thought it could not be the maid!" On his 
first surprise at hearing the keys touched in somewhat an airy 

^ "Earless on high stood, unabashed, Defoe." — Dunciad. [Lamb's 
note.] 

2 Songs by Arne in Artaxerxes, the first play that Lamb ever 
attended, when he was "not past six years old." The event is 
recorded in the essay entitled "My First Play." 



A CHAPTER ON EARS 53 

and masterful way, not dreaming of me, his suspicions had 
hghted on Jenny. But a grace, snatched from a superior 
refinement, soon convinced him that some being — technically 
perhaps deficient, but higher informed from a principle com- 
mon to all the fine arts — had swayed the keys to a mood 
which Jenny, with all her (less cultivated) enthusiasm, could 
never have elicited from them. I mention this as a proof of 
my friend's penetration, and not with any view of disparag- 
ing Jenny. 

Scientifically I could never be made to understand (yet 
have I taken some pains) what a note in music is ; or how one 
note should differ from another. Much less in voices can I 
distinguish a soprano from a tenor. Only sometimes the 
thorough-bass I contrive to guess at, from its being superemi- 
nently harsh and disagreeable. I tremble, however, for my 
misapplication of the simplest terms of that which I disclaim. 
While I profess my ignorance, I scarce know what to say I 
am ignorant of. I hate, perhaps, by misnomers. Sostenuto ^ 
and adagio ^ stand in the like relation of obscurity to me ; and 
Sol, Fa, Mi, Re, is as conjuring as Baralipton} 

It is hard to stand alone in an age like this, — (constituted 
to the quick and critical perception of all harmonious combi- 
nations, I verily believe, beyond all preceding ages, since 
Jubal stumbled upon the gamut,) — to remain, as it were, 
singly unimpressible to the magic influences of an art 
which is said to have such an especial stroke at soothing, 
elevating, and refining the passions. — Yet, rather than 
break the candid current of my confessions, I must avow to 
you that I have received a great deal more pain than pleas- 
ure from this so cried-up faculty. 

1 am constitutionally susceptible of noises. A carpenter's 

^ Sostenuto : a musical term, meaning sustained or prolonged. 
Adagio means slowly. 

2 A technical term used in logic. Lamb means that the technics 
of music are as unmeaning to him as the term Baralipton is to a 
man who knows sound logical argument, but who would be con- 
fused if he were to name the steps in his arguments by the technical 
terms used in logic. 



54 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

hammer, in a warm summer noon, will fret me into more than 
midsummer madness. But those unconnected, unset sounds, 
are nothing to the measured malice of music. The ear is 
passive to those single strokes; willingly enduring stripes 
while it hath no task to con. To music it cannot be passive. 
It will strive — mine at least will — 'spite of its inaptitude, 
to thrid the maze; like an unskilled eye painfully poring 
upon hieroglyphics. I have sat through an Italian Opera, 
till, for sheer pain, and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed 
out into the noisiest places of the crowded streets, to solace 
myself with sounds which I was not obliged to follow, and 
get rid of the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren 
attention ! I take refuge in the unpretending assemblage of 
honest common-life sounds ; — and the purgatory of the 
Enraged Musician becomes my paradise. 

I have sat at an Oratorio (that profanation of the purposes 
of the cheerful playhouse) watching the faces of the auditory 
in the pit (what a contrast to Hogarth's Laughing Audience !) 
immovable, or affecting some faint emotion — till (as some 
have said, that our occupations in the next world will be but 
a shadow of what delighted us in this) I have imagined myself 
in some cold Theatre in Hades, where some of the forms of the 
earthly one should be kept up, with none of the enjoyment , 
or like that 

Party in a parlor 

All silent, and all damned.* 

Above all, those insufferable concertos, and pieces of music, 
as they are called, do plague and embitter my apprehension. 
— Words are something; but to be exposed to an endlest 
battery of mere sounds ; to be long a dying ; to lie stretched 
upon a rack of roses; to keep up languor by unintermitted 
effort ; to pile honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to 
an interminable tedious sweetness; to fill up sound with 
feeling, and strain ideas to keep pace with it; to gaze on 
empty frames, and be forced to make the pictures for your- 

^ From a stanze in Wordsworth's first edition of Peter Bell, after- 
wards omitted. 



A CHAPTER ON EARS 55 

self; to read a book all stops and be obliged to supply the 
verbal matter; to invent extempore tragedies to answer to 
the vague gestures of an inexplicable rambling mime — these 
are faint shadows of what I have undergone from a series of 
the ablest-executed pieces of this empty instrumental music. 

I deny not, that in the opening of a concert, I have experi- 
enced something vastly lulling and agreeable : — afterwards 
foUoweth the languor and the oppression. — Like that disap- 
pointing book in Patmos; or, like the comings on of mel- 
ancholy, described by Burton, doth music make her first 
insinuating approaches : — ''Most pleasant it is to such as are 
melancholy given, to walk alone in some solitary grove, betwixt 
wood and water, by some brook side, and to meditate upon 
some delightsome and pleasant subject, which shall affect 
him most, amabilis insania,^ and mentis gratissimus error} 
A most incomparable delight to build castles in the air, to go 
smiling to themselves, acting an infinite variety of parts, 
which they suppose, and strongly imagine, they act, or that 
they see done. — So delightsome these toys at first, they 
could spend whole days and nights without sleep, even whole 
years in such contemplations, and fantastical meditations, 
which are like so many dreams, and will hardly be drawn 
from them — winding and unwinding themselves as so many 
clocks, and still pleasing their humors, until at the last the 
SCENE TURNS UPON A SUDDEN, and they being now habitated 
to such meditations and solitary places, can endure no com- 
pany, can think of nothing but harsh and distasteful subjects. 
Fear, sorrow, suspicion, subrusticus pudor,^ discontent, 
cares, and weariness of life, surprise them en a sudden, and 
they can think of nothing else : continually suspecting, no 
sooner are their eyes open, but this infernal plague of melan- 
choly seizeth on them, and terrifies their souls, representirj 
some dismal object to their minds ; which now, by no means, 
no labor, no persuasions, they can avoid, they cannot be rid 
of, they cannot resist." 

Something like this "scene turning" I have experienced 

* Delightful madness and a most pleasing hallucination. 
2 Rustic bashfulness. 



56 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

at the evening parties, at the house of my good Catholic 

friend Nov ; who, by the aid of a capital organ, himself 

the most finished of players, converts his drawing-room into 
a chapel, his week days into Sundays, and these latter into 
minor heavens.^ 

When my friend commences upon one of those solemn 
anthems, which peradventure struck upon my heedless ear, 
rambling in the side aisles of the dim Abbey, some five 
and thirty years since, waking a new sense, and putting a 
soul of old religion into my young apprehension — (whether 
it be that, in which the Psalmist, weary of the persecu- 
tions of bad men, wisheth to himself dove's wings — or that 
other which, with a like measure of sobriety and pathos, 
inquireth by what means the young man shall best cleanse 
his mind) — a holy calm pervadeth me. — I am for the 
time 

rapt above earth. 

And possess joys not promised at my birth.^ 

But when this master of the spell, not content to have 
laid a soul prostrate, goes on, in his power, to inflict more 
bliss than lies in her capacity to receive, — impatient to 
overcome her ''earthly" with his ''heavenly," — still pour- 
ing in, for protracted hours, fresh waves and fresh from 
the sea of sound, or from that inexhausted German ocean, 
above which, in triumphant progress, dolphin-seated, ride 
those Arions Haydn and Mozart, with their attendant Tritons, 
Bach, Beethoven, and a countless tribe, whom to attempt 
to reckon up would but plunge me again in the deeps, — I 
stagger under the weight of harmony, reeling to and fro at 
my wits' end ; — clouds, as of frankincense, oppress me — 
priests, altars, censers, dazzle before me — the genius of his 
religion hath me in her toils — a shadowy triple tiara invests 
the brow of my friend, late so naked, so ingenuous — he is 

^ I have been there, and still would go — 
'Tis like a little heaven below. — Dr. Watts. [Lamb's note.] 
2 Cf. Walton's The Complete Angler, I. ch. iv. : 
" I was for that time lifted above earth ; 
And possest joys not promised by my birth." 



A QUAKERS' MEETING 57 

Pope, — and by him sits, like as in the anomaly of dreams, 
a she-Pope too, — tri-coronated like himself ! — I am con- 
verted, and yet a Protestant ; — at once malleus hereticorum,^ 
and myself grand heresiarch : or three heresies centre in my 
person : — I am Marcion, Ebion, and Cerinthus — Gog and 
Magog — what not ? — till the coming in of the friendly 
supper-tray dissipates the figment, and a draught of true 
Lutheran beer (in which chiefly my friend shows himself 
no bigot) at once reconciles me to the rationalities of a purer 
faith; and restores to me the genuine unterrifying aspects 
of my pleasant-countenanced host and hostess. 



A QUAKERS' MEETING 

Still-born Silence ! thou that art 

Flood-gate of the deeper heart ! 

Offspring of a heavenly kind I 

Frost o' the mouth, and thaw o' the mind I 

Secrecy's confidant, and he 

Who makes religion mystery ! 

Admiration's speaking'st tongue I 

Leave, thy desert shades among, 

Reverend hermits' hallow'd cells, 

Where retired devotion dwells I 

With thy enthusiasms come. 

Seize our tongues, and strike us dumb I ^ 

Reader, would'st thou know what true peace and quiet 
mean; would'st thou find a refuge from the noises and 
clamors of the multitude; would'st thou enjoy at once 
solitude and society; would'st thou possess the depth of 
thine own spirit in stillness, without being shut out from 
the consolatory faces of thy species ; would'st thou be alone 
and yet accompanied; solitary, yet not desolate; singular, 
yet not without some to keep thee in countenance; a unit 

^ Hammer of heretics. A book with this title was written by the 
German, Johann Faber (1478-1541), who opposed the Protestant 
Revolt. 

^ From Poems of all Sorts, by Richard Fleckno, 1653. 



58 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

in aggregate ; a simple in composite : — come with me into 
a Quakers' Meeting. 

Dost thou love silence deep as that "before the winds 
were made"? go not out into the wilderness, descend not 
into the profundities of the earth; shut not up thy case- 
ments; nor pour wax into the little cells of thy ears, with 
little-faithed self-mistrusting Ulysses.^ — Retire with me into 
a Quakers' Meeting. 

For a man to refrain even from good words, and to hold 
his peace, it is commendable ; but for a multitude, it is great 
mastery. 

What is the stillness of the desert compared with this 
place ? what the uncommunicating muteness of fishes ? — 
here the goddess reigns and revels. — ''Boreas, and Cesias, 
and Argestes loud," ^ do not with their inter-confounding 
uproars more augment the brawl — nor the waves of the 
blown Baltic with their clubbed sounds — than their oppo- 
site (Silence her sacred self) is multiplied and rendered 
more intense by numbers and by sympathy. She too 
hath her deeps, that call unto deeps. Negation itself hath 
a positive more and less; and closed eyes would seem to 
obscure the great obscurity of midnight. 

There are wounds which an imperfect solitude cannot 
heal. By imperfect I mean that which a man enjoyeth 
by himself. The perfect is that which he can sometimes 
attain in crowds, but nowhere so absolutely as in a Quakers' 
Meeting. — Those first hermits did certainly understand this 
principle, when they retired into Egyptian solitudes, not 
singly, but in shoals, to enjoy one another's want of con- 
versation. The Carthusian is bound to his brethren by this 
agreeing spirit of incommunicativeness. In secular occa- 
sions, what so pleasant as to be reading a book through a 

^ "The ship stood still, Ulysses guessed that the island of the Sirens 
was not far off, and that they had charmed the air so with their 
magic singing. Therefore he made him cakes of wax, as Circe had 
instructed him, and stopped the ears of his men with them." Lamb's 
Adventures of Ulysses, Chapter III. 

2 Paradise Lost, x. 699. The north, the northeast, and the north- 
west winds. 



A QUAKERS' MEETING 59 

long winter evening, with a friend sitting by — say, a wife — • 
he, or she, too (if that be probable), reading another without 
interruption, or oral communication ? — can there be no 
sympathy without the gabble of words ? — away with this 
inhuman, shy, single, shade-and-cavern-haunting solitariness. 
Give me, Master Zimmerman, a sympathetic solitude. 

To pace alone in the cloisters or side aisles of some cathe- 
dral, time-stricken; 

Or under hanging mountains, 
Or by the fall of fountains; ^ 

is but a vulgar luxury compared with that which those 
enjoy who come together for the purposes of more com- 
plete, abstracted solitude. This is the loneliness "to be 
felt." — The Abbey Church of Westminster hath nothing 
so solemn, so spirit soothing, as the naked walls and benches 
of a Quakers' Meeting. Here are no tombs, no inscriptions, 

Sands, ignoble things, 



Dropt from the ruined sides of kings — ^ 

but here is something which throws Antiquity herself into 
the foreground — Silence — eldest of things — language of 
old Night — primitive discourser — to which the insolent 
decays of mouldering grandeur have but arrived by a violent, 
and, as we may say, unnatural progression. 

How reverend is the view of these hushed heads, 
Looking tranquillity I ^ 

Nothing-plotting, nought-caballing, unmischievous synod! 
convocation without intrigue ! parliament without debate ! 
what a lesson dost thou read to council, and to consistory ! — 
if my pen treat of you lightly — as haply it will wander — 
yet my spirit hath gravely felt the wisdom of your custom, 
when, sitting among you in deepest peace, which some out- 
welling tears would rather confirm than disturb, I have re- 
verted to the times of your beginnings, and the sowings of 

^ Pope's Ode to St. Cecilia's Day. 

2 Beaumont's On the Tombs in Westminster Abbey. 

' Cf. Congreve's Mourning Bride, ii. 1. 



60 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A 

the seed by Fox and Dewesbury. — I have witnessed that 
which brought before my eyes your heroic tranquilhty, in- 
flexible to the rude jests and serious violences of the insolent 
soldiery, republican or royalist, sent to molest you — for ye 
sate betwixt the fires of two persecutions, the outcast and 
off-scouring of church and presbytery. — I have seen the 
reeling sea-ruffian, who had wandered into your receptacle 
with the avowed intention of disturbing your quiet, from the 
very spirit of the place receive in a moment a new heart, and 
presently sit among ye as a lamb amidst lambs. And I 
remember Penn before his accusers, and Fox in the bail dock, 
where he was lifted up in spirit, as he tells us, and "the 
Judge and the Jury became as dead men under his feet." 

Reader, if you are not acquainted with it, I would recom- 
mend to you, above all church-narratives, to read Sewel's 
History of the Quakers. It is in folio, and is the abstract of 
the journals of Fox and the primitive Friends. It is far 
more edifying and affecting than anything you will read of 
Wesley and his colleagues. Here is nothing to stagger you, 
nothing to make you mistrust, no suspicion of alloy, no drop 
or dreg of the worldly or ambitious spirit. You will here 
read the true story of that much-injured, ridiculed man (who 
perhaps hath been a byword in your mouth) — James Nay- 
lor : what dreadful sufferings, with what patience, he en- 
dured, even to the boring through of his tongue with red-hot 
irons, without a murmur; and with what strength of mind, 
when the delusion he had fallen into, which they stigmatized 
for blasphemy, had given way to clearer thoughts, he could 
renounce his error, in a strain of the beautifullest humility, 
yet keep his first grounds, and be a Quaker still ! — so dif- 
ferent from the practice of your common converts from 
enthusiasm, who, when they apostatize, apostatize all, and 
think they can never get far enough from the society of their 
former errors, even to the renunciation of some saving truths, 
with which they had been mingled, not implicated. 

Get the writings of John Woolman by heart; and love 
the early Quakers. 

How far the followers of these good men in our days 



A QUAKERS' MEETING 61 

have kept to the primitive spirit, or in what proportion 
they have substituted formaUty for it, the Judge of Spirits 
can alone determine. I have seen faces in their assembhes 
upon which the dove sate visibly brooding. Others, again, 
I have watched, when my thoughts should have been better 
engaged, in which I could possibly detect nothing but a blank 
inanity. But quiet was in all, and the disposition to unanim- 
ity, and the absence of the fierce controversial workings. — 
If the spiritual pretensions of the Quakers have abated, at 
least they make few pretences. Hypocrites they certainly 
are not, in their preaching. It is seldom, indeed, that you 
shall see one get up amongst them to hold forth. Only now 
and then a trembling, female, generally ancient, voice is 
heard — you cannot guess from what part of the meeting it 
proceeds — with a low, buzzing, musical sound, laying out 
a few words which ''she thought might suit the condition of 
some present," with a quaking diffidence, which leaves no 
possibility of supposing that anything of female vanity 
was mixed up, where the tones were so full of tenderness, 
and a restraining modesty. — The men, for what I have 
observed, speak seldomer. 

Once only, and it was some years ago, I witnessed a sample 
of the old Foxian orgasm. It was a man of giant stature, 
who, as Wordsworth phrases it, might have danced "from 
head to foot equipt in iron mail." ^ His frame was of iron 
too. But he was malleable. I saw him shake all over with 
the spirit — I dare not say, of delusion. The strivings of 
the outer man were unutterable — he seemed not to speak, 
but to be spoken from. I saw the strong man bowed down, 
and his knees to fail — his joints all seemed loosening — it 
was a figure to set off against Paul preaching — the words 
he uttered were few, and sound — he was evidently resisting 
his will — keeping down his own word-wisdom with more 
mighty effort than the world's orators strain for theirs. " He 
had been a wit in his youth," he told us, with expressions of 
a sober remorse. And it was not till long after the im- 

* Cf. Wordsworth's "'Tis said that some have died for love." 



62 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

pression had begun to wear away that I was enabled, with 
something Hke a smile, to recall the striking incongruity of 
the confession — understanding the term in its worldly 
acceptation — with the frame and physiognomy of the per- 
son before me. His brow would have scared away the 
Levites — the Jocos Risus-que — faster than the Loves fled 
the face of Dis at Enna. — By wit, even in his youth, I will 
be sworn he understood something far within the limits of 
an allowable liberty. 

More frequently the Meeting is broken up without a 
word having been spoken. But the mind has been fed. 
You go away with a sermon not made with hands. You 
have been in the milder caverns of Trophonius; or as in 
some den, where that fiercest and savagest of all wild crea- 
tures, the Tongue, that unruly member, has strangely 
lain tied up and captive. You have bathed with still- 
ness. — 0, when the spirit is sore fretted, even tired to 
sickness of the j anglings and nonsense-noises of the world, 
what a balm and a solace it is to go and seat yourself, for a 
quiet half-hour, upon some undisputed corner of a bench, 
among the gentle Quakers ! 

Their garb and stillness conjoined, present a uniformity, 
tranquil and herd-like — as in the pasture — "forty feeding 
like one."^ 

The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of re- 
ceiving a soil; and cleanliness in them to be something 
more than the absence of its contrary. Every Quakeress 
is a lily ; and when they come up in bands to their Whitsun 
conferences, whitening the easterly streets of the metropolis, 
from all parts of the United Kingdom, they show like troops 
of the Shining Ones. 

^ Wordsworth's Lines Written in March. 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES 63 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES 

I am of a constitution so general, that it consorts and 
sympathizeth with all things; I have no antipathy, or rather 
idiosyncrasy, in anything. Those national repugnancies do 
not touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the French, 
Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch. — Religio Medici. 

That the author of the Religio Medici, mounted upon the 
airy stilts of abstraction, conversant about notional and 
conjectural essences; in whose categories of Being the 
possible took the upper hand of the actual; should have 
overlooked the impertinent individualities of such poor 
concretions as mankind, is not much to be admired. It 
is rather to be wondered at, that in the genus of animals 
he should have condescended to distinguish that species 
at all. For myself — earth-bound and fettered to the scene 
of my activities, — 

Standing on earth, not rapt above the sky,^ 

I confess that I do feel the differences of mankind, national 
or individual, to an unhealthy excess. I can look with no 
indifferent eye upon things or persons. Whatever is, is 
to me a matter of taste or distaste; or when once it be- 
comes indifferent, it begins to be disrelishing. I am, in 
plainer words, a bundle of prejudices — made up of likings 
and dislikings — the veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies, 
antipathies. In a certain sense, I hope it may be said of 
me that I am a lover of my species. I can feel for all in- 
differently, but I cannot feel towards all equally. The 
more purely-English word that expresses sympathy, will 
better explain my meaning. I can be a friend to a worthy 
man, who upon another account cannot be my mate or 
fellow. I cannot like all people alike. ^ 

^ Cf. Paradise Lost, vii. 23. 

2 1 would be understood as confining myself to the subject of 
im'perfect sympathies. Tq nations or cja^^es of men there can be 



64 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and 
am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair. They 
cannot like me — and in truth, I never knew one of that 
nation who attempted to do it. There is something more 
plain and ingenuous in their mode of proceeding. We know 
one another at first sight. There is an order of imperfect 
intellects (under which mine must be content to rank) which 
in its constitution is essentially anti-Caledonian. The owners 
of the sort of faculties I allude to, have minds rather sug- 
gestive than comprehensive. They have no pretences to 
much clearness or precision in their ideas, or in their manner 
of expressing them. Their intellectual wardrobe (to confess 
fairly) has few whole pieces in it. They are content with 
fragments and scattered pieces of Truth. She presents no 
full front to them — a feature or side-face at the most. Hints 
and glimpses, germs and crude essays at a system, is the 
utmost they pretend to. They beat up a little game perad- 
venture — and leave it to knottier heads, more robust con- 
no direct antipathy. There may be individuals born and constel- 
lated so opposite to another individual nature, that the same sphere 
cannot hold them. I have met with my moral antipodes, and can 
believe the story of two persons meeting (who never saw one an- 
other in their lives) and instantly fighting. 

We by proof find there should be 



'Twixt raan and man such an antipathy, 
That though he can show no just reason why 
For any former wrong or injury. 
Can neither find a blemish in his fame, 
Nor aught in face or feature justly blame, 
Can challenge or accuse him of no evil. 
Yet notwithstanding hates him as a devil. 

The lines are from old Hej'wood's Hierarchie of Angels, and 
he subjoins a curious story in confirmation, of a Spaniard who 
attempted to assassinate a king Ferdinand of Spain, and being put 
to the rack could give no other reason for the deed but an inveterate 
antipathy which he had taken to the first sight of the king, 

The cause which to that act compell'd him 



Was, he ne'er loved hini since he first beheld him. 

[Lamb's note.] 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES 65 

stitutions, to run it down. The light that hghts them is not 
steady and polar, but mutable and shifting: waxing, and 
again waning. Their conversation is accordingly. They 
will throw out a random word in or out of season, and be 
content to let it pass for what it is worth. They cannot 
speak always as if they were upon their oath — but must be 
understood, speaking or writing, with some abatement. 
They seldom wait to mature a proposition, but e'en bring it 
to market in the green ear. They delight to impart their 
defective discoveries as they arise, without waiting for their 
full development. They are no systematizers, and would 
but err more by attempting it. Their minds, as I said before, 
are suggestive merely. The brain of a true Caledonian (if 
I am not mistaken) is constituted upon quite a different plan. 
His Minerva is born in panoply. You are never admitted 
to see his ideas in their growth — if, indeed, they do grow, 
and are not rather put together upon principles of clock-work. 
You never catch his mind in an undress. He never hints 
or suggests anything, but unlades his stock of ideas in per- 
fect order and completeness. He brings his total wealth into 
company, and gravely unpacks it. His riches are always 
about him. He never stoops to catch a glittering something 
in your presence to share it with you, before he quite knows 
whether it be true touch or not. You cannot cry halves to 
anything that he finds. He does not find, but bring. You 
never witness his first apprehension of a thing. His under- 
standing is always at its meridian — you never see the first 
dawn, the early streaks. — He has no falterings of self- 
suspicion. Surmises, guesses, misgivings, half-intuitions, 
semi-consciousnesses, partial illuminations, dim instincts, 
embryo conceptions, have no place in his brain or vocabu- 
lary. The twilight of dubiety never falls upon him. Is he 
orthodox — he has no doubts. Is he an infidel — he has 
none either. Between the affirmative and the negative there 
is no border-land with him. You cannot hover with him 
upon the confines of truth, or wander in the maze of a prob- 
able argument. He always keeps the path. You cannot 
make excursions with him — for he sets you right. His taste 



66 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

never fluctuates. His morality never abates. He cannot 
compromise, or understand middle actions. There can be 
but a right and a wrong. His conversation is as a book. 
His affirmations have the sanctity of an oath. You must 
speak upon the square with him. He stops a metaphor like 
a suspected person in an enemy's country. "A healthy 
book ! " — said one of his countrymen to me, who had ven- 
tured to give that appellation to John Buncle, — ''Did I 
catch rightly what you said? I have heard of a man in 
health, and of a healthy state of body, but I do not see how 
that epithet can be properly applied to a book." Above all, 
you must beware of indirect expressions before a Caledonian. 
Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily 
blest with a vein of it. Remember you are upon your oath. 
I have a print of a graceful female after Leonardo da Vinci, 

which I was showing off to Mr. . After he had examined 

it minutely, I ventured to ask him how he liked my beauty 
(a foolish name it goes by among my friends) — when he 
very gravely assured me, that "he had considerable respect 
for my character and talents'' (so he was pleased to say), 
''but had not given himself much thought about the degree 
of my personal pretensions." The misconception staggered 
me, but did not seem much to disconcert him. — Persons of 
this nation are particularly fond of affirming a truth — which 
nobody doubts. They do not so properly affirm, as annun- 
ciate it. They do indeed appear to have such a love of truth 
(as if, like virtue, it were valuable for itself) that all truth 
becomes equally valuable, whether the proposition that con- 
tains it be new or old, disputed, or such as is impossible to 
become a subject of disputation. I was present not long 
since at a party of North Britons, where a son of Burns was 
expected; and happened to drop a silly expression (in my 
South British way), that I wished it were the father instead 
of the son — when four of them started up at once to inform 
me, that "that was impossible, because he was dead." An 
impracticable wish, it seems, was more than they could con- 
ceive. Swift has hit off this part of their character, namely, 
their love of truth, in his biting way, but with an illiberality 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHI*ES 67 

that necessarily confines the passage to the margin.^ The 
tediousness of these people is certainly provoking. I wonder 
if they ever tire one another ! — In my early life I had a 
passionate fondness for the poetry of Burns. I have some- 
times foolishly hoped to ingratiate myself with his country- 
men by expressing it. But I have always found that a true 
Scot resents your admiration of his compatriot even more 
than he would your contempt of him. The latter he imputes 
to your "imperfect acquaintance with many of the words 
which he uses;" and the same objection makes it a presump- 
tion in you to suppose that you can admire him. — Thomson 
they seem to have forgotten. Smollett they have neither 
forgotten nor forgiven for his delineation of Rory and his 
companion, upon their first introduction to our metropolis. — 
Speak of Smollett as a great genius, and they will retort upon 
you Hume's History compared with his Continuation of it. 
What if the historian had continued Humphrey Clinker? 

I have, in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews. They 
are a piece of stubborn antiquity, compared with which 
Stonehenge is in its nonage. They date beyond the pyra- 
mids. But I should not care to be in habits of familiar 
intercourse with any of that nation. I confess that I have 
not the nerves to enter their synagogues. Old prejudices 
cling about me. I cannot shake off the story of Hugh of 
Lincoln. Centuries of injury, contempt, and hate, on the 
one side, — of cloaked revenge, dissimulation, and hate, on 
the other, between our -and their fathers, must and ought 
to affect the blood of the children. I cannot beheve it can 
run clear and kindly yet ; or that a few fine words, such as 

1 There are some people who think they sufficiently acquit them- 
selves, and entertain their company, with relating facts of no con- 
sequence, not at all out of the road of such common incidents as 
happen every day; and this I have observed more frequently among 
the Scots than any other nation, who are very careful not to omit 
the minutest circumstances of time or place; which kind of dis- 
course, if it were not a little reheved by the uncouth terms and 
phrases, as well as accent and gesture, pecuhar to that country, 
would be hardly tolerable. — Hints towards an Essay on Conversa- 
tion. [Lamb's note.] 



68 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

candor, liberality, the light of a nineteenth century, can 
close up the breaches of so deadly a disunion. A Hebrew 
is nowhere congenial to me. He is least distasteful on 
'Change — for the mercantile spirit levels all distinctions, as 
all are beauties in the dark. I boldly confess that I do not 
relish the approximation of Jew and Christian, which has 
become so fashionable. The reciprocal endearments have, 
to me, something hypocritical and unnatural in them. I do 
not like to see the Church and Synagogue kissing and con- 
geeing in awkward postures of an affected civility. If 
they are converted, why do they not come over to us alto- 
gether? Why keep up a form of separation, when the life 
of it is fled? If they can sit with us at table, why do they 
kick at our cookery? I do not understand these half con- 
vertites. Jews christianizing — Christians judaizing — puz- 
zle me. I like fish or flesh. A moderate Jew is a more con- 
founding piece of anomaly than a wet Quaker. The spirit 

of the synagogue is essentially separative. B would 

have been more in keeping if he had abided by the faith of 
his forefathers. There is a fine scorn in his face, which nature 

meant to be of Christians. The Hebrew spirit is strong 

in him, in spite of his proselytism. He cannot conquer the 
Shibboleth. How it breaks out, when he sings, " The Children 
of Israel passed through the Red Sea!'' The auditors, for 
the moment, are as Egyptians to him, and he rides over our 

necks in triumph. There is no mistaking him. B has a 

strong expression of sense in his countenance, and it is con- 
firmed by his singing. The foundation of his vocal excellence 
is sense. He sings with understanding, as Kemble delivered 
dialogue. He would sing the Commandments, and give an 
appropriate character to each prohibition. His nation, in 
general, have not over-sensible countenances. How should 
they ? — but you seldom see a silly expression among them. 
— Gain, and the pursuit of gain, sharpen a man's visage. I 
never heard of an idiot being born among them. — Some 
admire the Jewish female-physiognomy. I admire it — but 
with trembling. Jael had those full dark inscrutable eyes. 
In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES 69 

traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness 
towards some of these faces — or rather masks — that have 
looked out kindly upon one in casual encounters in the streets 
and highways. I love what Fuller beautifully calls — these 
"images of God cut in ebony.'' But I should not hke to 
associate with them, to share my meals and my good nights 
with them — because they are black. 

I love Quaker ways, and Quaker worship. I venerate 
the Quaker principles. It does me good for the rest of the 
day when I meet any of their people in my path. When I 
am ruffled or disturbed by any occurrence, the sight, or quiet 
voice of a Quaker, acts upon me as a ventilator, lightening 
the air, and taking off a load from the bosom. But I cannot 
like the Quakers (as Desdemona would say) "to live with 
them." I am all over sophisticated — with humors, fan- 
cies, craving hourly sympathy. I must have books, pictures, 
theatres, chit-chat, scandal, jokes, ambiguities, and a thousand 
whim-whams, which their simpler taste can do without. I 
should starve at their primitive banquet. My appetites are 
too high for the salads which (according to Evelyn) Eve 
dressed for the angel ; ^ my gusto too excited 

To sit a guest with Daniel at his pulse.^ 

The indirect answers which Quakers are often found to 
return to a question put to them may be explained, I think, 
without the vulgar assumption, that they are more given to 
evasion and equivocating than other people. They naturally 
look to their words more carefully, and are more cautious of 
committing themselves. They have a peculiar character to 
keep up on this head. They stand in a manner upon their 
veracity, A Quaker is by law exempted from taking an oath. 
The custom of resorting to an oath in extreme cases, sanctified 
as it is by all religious antiquity, is apt (it must be confessed) 
to introduce into the laxer sort of minds the notion of two 
kinds of truth — the one applicable to the solemn affairs of 
justice, and the other to the common proceedings of daily 
intercourse. As truth bound upon the conscience by an 

* Paradise Lost, v. 315 ff. ^ Paradise Regained, ii. 278. 



70 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

oath can be but truth, so in the common affirmations of the 
shop and the market-place a latitude is expected and con- 
ceded upon questions wanting this solemn covenant. Some- 
thing less than truth satisfies. It is common to hear a person 
say, "You do not expect me to speak as if I were upon my 
oath." Hence a great deal of incorrectness and inadvertency, 
short of falsehood, creeps into ordinary conversation; and a 
kind of secondary or laic-truth is tolerated, where clergy- 
truth — oath-truth, by the nature of the circumstances, is 
not required. A Quaker knows none of this distinction. His 
simple affirmation being received upon the most sacred occa- 
sions, without any further test, stamps a value upon the 
words which he is to use upon the most indifferent topics of 
life. He looks to them, naturally, with more severity. You 
can have of him no more than his word. He knows, if he is 
caught tripping in a casual expression, he forfeits, for himself 
at least, his claim to the invidious exemption. He knows 
that his syllables are weighed — and how far a consciousness 
of this particular watchfulness, exerted against a person, has 
a tendency to produce indirect answers, and a diverting of the 
question by honest means, might be illustrated, and the prac- 
tice justified, by a more sacred example than is proper to be 
adduced upon this occasion. The admirable presence of 
mind, which is notorious in Quakers upon all contingencies, 
might be traced to this imposed self- watchfulness — if it did 
not seem rather an humble and secular scion of that old stock 
of religious constancy, which never bent or faltered, in the 
Primitive Friends, or gave way to the winds of persecution, 
to the violence of judge or accuser, under trials and racking 
examinations. "You will never be the wiser, if I sit here 
answering your questions till midnight," said one of those 
upright Justicers to Penn, who had been putting law-cases 
with a puzzling subtlety. "Thereafter as the answers may 
be," retorted the Quaker. The astonishing composure of 
this people is sometimes ludicrously displayed in lighter 
instances. — I was travelling in a stage-coach with three 
male Quakers, buttoned up in the straitest nonconformity of 
their sect. We stopped to bait at Andover, where a meal, 



I 



WITCHES AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS 71 

partly tea apparatus, partly supper, was set before us. My 
friends confined themselves to the tea-table. I in my way 
took supper. When the landlady brought in the bill, the 
eldest of my companions discovered that she had charged 
for both meals. This was resisted. Mine hostess was very 
clamorous and positive. Some mild arguments were used 
on the part of the Quakers, for which the heated mind of the 
good lady seemed by no means a fit recipient. The guard 
came in with his usual peremptory notice. The Quakers 
pulled out their money and formally tendered it — so much 
for tea -^ I, in humble imitation, tendering mine — for the 
supper which I had taken. She would not relax in her 
demand. So they all three quietly put up their silver, as 
did myself, and marched out of the room, the eldest and 
gravest going first, with myself closing up the rear, who 
thought I could not do better than follow the example of 
such grave and warrantable personages. We got in. The 
steps went up. The coach drove off. The murmurs of mine 
hostess, not very indistinctly or ambiguously pronounced, 
became after a time inaudible — and now my conscience, 
which the whimsical scene had for a while suspended, begin- 
ning to give some twitches, I waited, in the hope that some 
justification would be offered by these serious persons for 
the seeming injustice of their conduct. To my great surprise 
not a syllable was dropped on the subject. They sat as mute 
as at a meeting. At length the eldest of them broke silence, 
by inquiring of his next neighbor, "Hast thee heard how 
indigos go at the India House ? " and the question operated 
as a soporific on my moral feeling as far as Exeter. 



WITCHES AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS 

We are too hasty when we set down our ancestors in the 
gross for fools, for the monstrous inconsistencies (as they 
seem to us) involved in their creed of witchcraft. In the 
relations of this visible world we find them to have been 



72 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

as rational, and shrewd to detect an historic anomaly, as 
ourselves. But when once the invisible world was sup- 
posed to be opened, and the lawless agency of bad spirits 
assumed, what measures of probability, of decency, of fit- 
ness, or proportion — of that which distinguishes the likely 
from the palpable absurd — could they have to guide them 
in the rejection or admission of any particular testimony? 

— That maidens pined away, wasting inwardly as their 
waxen images consumed before a fire — that corn was lodged, 
and cattle lamed — that whirlwinds uptore in diabolic 
revelry the oaks of the forest — or that spits and kettles 
only danced a fearful-innocent vagary about some rustic's 
kitchen when no wind was stirring — were all equally 
probable where no law of agency was understood. That 
the prince of the powers of darkness, passing by the flower 
and pomp of the earth, should lay preposterous siege to the 
weak fantasy of indigent eld — has neither likelihood nor 
unlikelihood h priori to us, who have no measure to guess 
at his policy, or standard to estimate what rate those anile 
souls may fetch in the devil's market. Nor, when the wicked 
are expressly symbolized by a goat, was it to be wondered at 
so much, that he should come sometimes in that body, and 
assert his metaphor. — That the intercourse was opened at 
all between both worlds was perhaps the mistake — but that 
once assumed, I see no reason for disbelieving one attested 
story of this nature more than another on the score of ab- 
surdity. There is no law to judge of the lawless, or canon 
by which a dream may be criticised. 

I have sometimes thought that I could not have existed 
in the days of received witchcraft; that I could not have 
slept in a village where one of those reputed hags dwelt. 
Our ancestors were bolder or more obtuse. Amidst the 
universal belief that these wretches were in league with 
the author of all evil, holding hell tributary to their mut- 
tering, no simple justice of the peace seems to have scrupled 
issuing, or silly headborough serving, a warrant upon them 

— as if they should subpoena Satan ! — Prospero in his boat, 
with his books and wand about him, suffers himself to be 



WITCHES AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS 73 

conveyed away at the mercy of his enemies to an unknown 
island. He might have raised a storm or two, we think, on 
the passage. His acquiescence is in exact analogy to the 
non-resistance of witches to the constituted powers. — What 
stops the Fiend in Spenser from tearing Guyon to pieces — 
or who had made it a condition of his prey that Guyon must 
take assay of the glorious bait — we have no guess. We do 
not know the laws of that country. 

From my childhood I was extremely inquisitive about 
witches and witch-stories. My maid, and more legendary 
aunt, supplied me with good store. But I shall mention the 
accident which directed my curiosity originally into this 
channel. In my father's book-closet the History of the Bible 
by Stackhouse occupied a distinguished station. The pic- 
tures with which it abounds — one of the ark, in particular, 
and another of Solomon's temple, delineated with all the 
fidelity of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist had been 
upon the spot — attracted my childish attention. There was 
a picture, too, of the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish 
that I had never seen. We shall come to that hereafter. 
Stackhouse is in two huge tomes; and there was a pleasure 
in removing folios of that magnitude, which, with infinite 
straining, was as much as I could manage, from the situation 
which they occupied upon an upper shelf. I have not met 
with the work from that time to this, but I remember it 
consisted of Old Testament stories, orderly set down, with 
the objection appended to each story, and the solution of 
the objection regularly tacked to that. The objection was a 
summary of whatever difficulties had been opposed to the 
credibility of the history by the shrewdness of ancient or 
modern infidelity, drawn up with an almost complimen- 
tary excess of candor. The solution was brief, modest, and 
satisfactory. The bane and antidote were both before you. 
To doubts so put, and so quashed, there seemed to be an end 
for ever. The dragon lay dead, for the foot of the veriest 
babe to trample on. But — hke as was rather feared than 
reahzed from that slain monster in Spenser — from the 
womb of those crushed errors young dragonets would creep, 



74 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

exceeding the prowess of so tender a Saint George as myself 
to vanquish. The habit of expecting objections to every 
passage set me upon starting more objections, for the glory 
of finding a solution of my own for them. I became staggered 
and perplexed, a sceptic in long-coats. The pretty Bible 
stories which I had read, or heard read in church, lost their 
purity and sincerity of impression, and were turned into so 
many historic or chronologic theses to be defended against 
whatever impugners. I was not to disbelieve them, but — 
the next thing to that — I was to be quite sure that some one 
or other would or had disbelieved them. Next to making 
a child an infidel, is the letting him know that there are 
infidels at all. Credulity is the man's weakness, but the 
child's strength. O, how ugly sound scriptural doubts from 
the mouth of a babe and a suckling ! — I should have lost 
myself in these mazes, and have pined away, I think, with 
such unfit sustenance as these husks afforded, but for a 
fortunate piece of ill-fortune which about this time befell 
me. Turning over the picture of the ark with too much haste, 
I unhappily made a breach in its ingenious fabric — driving 
my inconsiderate fingers right through the two larger quadru- 
peds, the elephant and the camel, that stare (as well they 
might) out of the two last windows next the steerage in that 
unique piece of naval architecture. Stackhouse was hence- 
forth locked up, and became an interdicted treasure. With 
the book, the objections and solutions gradually cleared out 
of my head, and have seldom returned since in any force to 
trouble me. But there was one impression which I had 
imbibed from Stackhouse, which no lock or bar could shut 
out, and which was destined to try my childish nerves rather 
more seriously. — That detestable picture ! 

I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. The night-time 
solitude, and the dark, were my hell. The sufferings I en- 
dured in this nature would justify the expression. I never 
laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from the fourth to the 
seventh or eighth year of my life — so far as memory serves 
in things so long ago — without an assurance, which realized 
its own prophecy, of seeing some frightful spectre. Be old 



WITCHES AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS 75 

Stackhouse then acquitted in part, if I say, that to his 
picture of the Witch raising up Samuel — ■■ (0 that old man 
covered with a mantle !) — I owe — not my midnight terrors, 
the hell of my infancy — but the shape and manner of their 
visitation. It was he who dressed up for me a hag that 
nightly sate upon my pillow — a sure bedfellow, when my 
aunt or my maid was far from me. All day long, while the 
book was permitted me, I dreamed waking over his delinea- 
tion, and at night (if I may use so bold an expression) awoke 
into sleep, and found the vision true. I durst not, even in the 
daylight, once enter the chamber where I slept, without my 
face turned to the window, aversely from the bed where my 
witch-ridden pillow was. Parents do not know what they 
do when they leave tender babes alone to go to sleep in the 
dark. The feeling about for a friendly arm — the hoping 
for a familiar voice — when they wake screaming — and find 
none to soothe them — what a terrible shaking it is to their 
poor nerves ! The keeping them up till midnight, through 
candle-light and the unwholesome hours, as they are called, — 
would, I am satisfied, in a medical point of view, prove the 
better caution. — That detestable picture, as I have said, 
gave the fashion to my dreams — if dreams they were — for 
the scene of them was invariably the room in which I lay. 
Had I never met with the picture, the fears would have come 
self -pictured in some shape or other — 

Headless bear, black man, or ape — * 

but, as it was, my imaginations took that form. — It is not 
book, or picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which 
create these terrors in children. They can at most but give 
them a direction. Dear little T. H., who of all children has 
been brought up with the most scrupulous exclusion of every 
taint of superstition — who was never allowed to hear of 
goblin or apparition, or scarcely to be told of bad men, or 
to read or hear of any distressing story — finds all this world 
of fear, from which he has been so rigidly excluded ab extra,^ 

*A remembrance from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, "The 
Abstract of Melancholy." ^ Externally, 



7G THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

in his own 'Hhick-coming fancies;"^ and from his little 
midnight pillow, this nurse-child of optimism will start at 
shapes, unborrowed of tradition, in sweats to which the 
reveries of the cell-damned murderer are tranquillity. 

GoT-gons, and Hydras, and Chimseras dire — stories of 
Celseno and the Harpies — may reproduce themselves in 
the brain of superstition — but they were there before. 
They are transcripts, types — the archetypes are in us, and 
eternal. How else should the recital of that, which we know 
in a waking sense to be false, come to affect us at all ? — or 

Names, whose sense we see not, 

Fray us with things that be not ? ^ 

Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, 
considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us 
bodily injury? — 0, least of all! These terrors are of older 
standing. They date beyond body — or, without the body, 
they would have been the same. All the cruel, tormenting, 
defined devils in Dante — tearing, mangling, choking, stifling, 
scorching demons — are they one half so fearful to the spirit 
of a man, as the simple idea of a spirit unembodied following 
him — 

Like one .that on a lonesome road 

Doth walk in fear and dread, 

And having once turn'd round, walks on 

And turns no more his head; 

Because he knows a frightful fiend 

Doth close behind him tread.^ 

That the kind of fear here treated of is purely spiritual 

— that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless upon earth 

— that it predominates in the period of sinless infancy — 
are difficulties, the solution of which might afford some 
probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a 
peep at least into the shadowland of preexistence. 

My night fancies have long ceased to be afflictive. I 
confess an occasional nightmare ; but I do not, as in early 
youth, keep a stud of them. Fiendish faces, with the ex- 



* Macbeth, v. 3. 38. ^ Spenser's Epithalamion, 343-344. 

^ Mr. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. [Lamb's note.] 



i 



WITCHES AND OTHER 'NIGHT FEARS 77 

tinguished taper, will come and look at me ; but I know them 
for mockeries, even while I cannot elude their presence, and 
I fight and grapple with them-. For the credit of my imagina- 
tion, I am almost ashamed to say how tame and prosaic my 
dreams are grown. They are never romantic, seldom even 
rural. They are of architecture and of buildings — cities 
abroad, which I have never seen and hardly have hope to 
see. I have traversed, for the seeming length of a natural 
day, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon — their churches, 
palaces, squares, market-places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with 
an inexpressible sense of delight — a map-like distinctness 
of trace, and a day-light vividness of vision, that was all 
but being awake. — I have formerly travelled among the 
Westmoreland fells — my highest Alps, — but they are 
objects too mighty for the grasp of my dreaming recognition; 
and I have again and again awoke with ineffectual struggles 
of the inner eye, to make out a shape, in any way whatever, 
of Helvellyn. Methought I was in that country, but the 
mountains were gone. The poverty of my dreams mortifies 
me. There is Coleridge, at his will can conjure up icy domes, 
and pleasure-houses for Kubla Khan, and Abyssinian maids, 
and songs of Abara, and caverns. 

Where Alph, the sacred river, runs,* 

to solace his night solitudes — when I cannot muster a fiddle. 
Barry Cornwall has his tritons and his nereids gamboling be- 
fore him in nocturnal visions, and proclaiming sons born to 
Neptune — when my stretch of imaginative activity can 
hardly, in the night season, raise up the ghost of a fish-wife. 
To set my failures in somewhat a mortifying light — it was 
after reading the noble Dream of this poet, that my fancy ran 
strong upon these marine spectra; and the poor plastic 
power, such as it is, within me set to work to humor my folly 
in a sort of dream that very night. Methought I was upon 
the ocean billows at some sea nuptials, riding and mounted 
high, with the customary train sounding their conchs before 
me (I myself, you may be sure, the leading god), and joUily 

^ Coleridge's Kuhla Khan. 



78 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

we went careering over the main, till just where Ino Leucothea 
should have greeted me (I think it was Ino) with a white 
embrace, the billows gradually subsiding, fell from a sea rough- 
ness to a sea calm, and thence to a river motion, and that 
river (as happens in the familiarization of dreams) was no 
other than the gentle Thames, which landed me, in the wafture 
of a placid wave or two, alone, safe and inglorious, some- 
where at the foot of Lambeth Palace. 

The degree of the soul's creativeness in sleep might furnish 
no whimsical criterion of the quantum of poetical faculty 
resident in the same soul waking. An old gentleman, a friend 
of mine, and a humorist, used to carry this notion so far, that 
when he saw any stripling of his acquaintance ambitious of 
becoming a poet, his first question would be, — "Young 
man, what sort of dreams have you ? " I have so much faith 
in my old friend's theory, that when I feel that idle vein re- 
turning upon me, I presently subside into my proper element 
of prose, remembering those eluding nereids, and that in- 
auspicious inland landing. 



VALENTINE'S DAY 

Hail to thy returning festival, old Bishop Valentine ! 
Great is thy name in the rubric, thou venerable Archflamen 
of Hymen! Immortal Go-between; who and what manner 
of person art thou? Art thou but a name, typifying the 
restless principle which impels poor humans to seek perfec- 
tion in union? or wert thou indeed a mortal prelate, with, 
thy tippet and thy rochet, thy apron on, and decent lawn 
sleeves ? Mysterious personage ! Like unto thee, assuredly, 
there is no other mitred father in the calendar ; not Jerome, 
nor Ambrose, nor Cyril; nor the consigner of undipt infants 
to eternal torments, Austin, whom all mothers hate ; nor he 
who hated all mothers, Origen; nor Bishop Bull, nor Arch- 
bishop Parker, nor Whitgift. Thou comest attended with 
thousands and ten thousands of little Loves, and the air is 



valentine's day 79 

Brush'd with the hiss of rustling wings .^ 

Singing Cupids are thy choristers and thy precentors ; and in- 
stead of the crosier, the mystical arrow is borne before thee. 

In other words, this is the day on which those charming 
little missives, ycleped Valentines, cross and intercross each 
other at every street and turning. The weary and all for- 
spent twopenny postman sinks beneath a load of delicate 
embarrassments, not his own. It is scarcely credible to 
what an extent this ephemeral courtship is carried on in this 
loving town, to the great enrichment of porters, and detri- 
ment of knockers and bell-wires. In these little visual inter- 
pretations, no emblem is so common as the heart, — that little 
three-cornered exponent of all our hopes and fears, — the 
bestuck and bleeding heart; it is twisted and tortured into 
more allegories and affectations than an opera hat. What 
authority we have in history or mythology for placing the 
headquarters and metropolis of god Cupid in this anatomical 
seat rather than in any other, is not very clear ; but we have 
got it, and it will serve as well as any other. Else we might 
easily imagine, upon some other system which might have 
prevailed for anything which our pathology knows to the 
contrary, a lover addressing his mistress, in perfect simplicity 
of feeling, "Madam, my Z^wrand fortune are entirely at 
your disposal;" or putting a delicate question, "Amanda, 
have you a midriff to bestow?" But custom has settled 
these things, and awarded the seat of sentiment to the afore- 
said triangle, while its less fortunate neighbors wait at 
animal and anatomical distance. 

Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and all 
rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door. It 
"gives a very echo to the throne where hope is seated."^ 

^ Paradise Lost, i. 768. 

2 Cf. Twelfth Night, ii. 4. 20. This is one of Lamb's free adapta- 
tions in a quotation. It is notable that the quotation is not isolated, 
but holds an integral part in the composition of the thought in the 
essay. A reading of the whole scene from Twelfth Night will show 
that the thought and the atmosphere of the essay are conceived in 
the spirit of the entire scene. 



80 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

But its issues seldom answer to this oracle within. It is so 
seldom that just the person we want to see comes. But of 
all the clamorous visitations the welcomest in expectation 
is the sound that ushers in, or seems to usher in, a Valentine. 
As the raven himself was hoarse that announced the fatal 
entrance of Duncan,* so the knock of the postman on this 
day is light, airy, confident, and befitting one that bringeth 
good tidings. It is less mechanical than on other days ; you 
will say, ''That is not the post, I am sure.'' Visions of Love, 
of Cupids, of Hymens ! — delightful eternal commonplaces, 
which ''having been will always be;''^ which no school-boy 
nor school-man can write away; having your irreversible 
throne in the fancy and affections — what are your trans- 
ports, when the happy maiden, opening with careful finger, 
careful not to break the emblematic seal, bursts upon the 
sight of some well-designed allegory, some type, some youth- 
ful fancy, not without verses — 

Lovers all, 
A madrigal,' 

or some such device, not over-abundant in sense — young 
Love disclaims it, — and not quite silly — something between 
wind and water, a chorus where the sheep might almost join 
the shepherd, as they did, or as I apprehend they did, in 
Arcadia. 

All Valentines are not foolish ; and I shall not easily forget 
thine, my kind friend (if I may have leave to call you so) 

E. B . E. B. lived opposite a young maiden, whom he 

had often seen, unseen, from his parlor window in C e 

Street. She was all joyousness and innocence, and just of 
an age to enjoy receiving a Valentine, and just of a temper 

^ Macbeth, i. 5. 39. 

2 Cf. Wordsworth's lines in the Ode, On Intimations of Immortality, 
X. 14-15: 

"The primal sympathy which having been must ever be.'"' 

3 "But a' never lived to touch it — a 'began all in a moment to sing 
* Lovers all, a Madrigall ' : 'Twas the only song Master Abram ever 
learned out of book" (Davy to Shallow, describing Slender's death, 
Falstaff's Letters, by James White). [Note by Hallward and Hill.] 



valentine's day 81 

to bear the disappointment of missing one with good humor. 
E. B. is an artist of no common powers ; in the fancy parts of 
designing, perhaps inferior to none; his name is known at 
the bottom of many a well-executed vignette in the way of 
his profession, but no further; for E. B. is modest, and the 
world meets nobody half way. E. B. meditated how he 
could repay this young maiden for many a favor which she 
had done him unknown; for when a kindly face greets us, 
though but passing by, and never knows us again, nor we it, we 
should feel it as an obligation: and E. B. did. This good 
artist set himself at work to please the damsel. It was just 
before Valentine's day three years since. He wrought, un- 
seen and unsuspected, a wondrous work. We need not say 
it was on the finest gilt paper with borders — full, not of 
common hearts and heartless allegory, but all the prettiest 
stories of love from Ovid, and older poets than Ovid (for 
E. B. is a scholar). There was Pyramus and Thisbe, and be 
sure Dido was not forgot, nor Hero and Leander, and swans 
more than sang in Cayster, with mottoes and fanciful devices, 
such as beseemed — a work, in short, of magic. Iris dipt the 
woof.^ This on Valentine's eve he commended to the all- 
swallowing indiscriminate orifice (0 ignoble trust !) of the 
common post; but the humble medium did its duty, and 
from his watchful stand the next morning he saw the cheerful 
messenger knock, and by-and-by the precious charge delivered. 
He saw, unseen, the happy girl unfold the Valentine, dance 
about, clap her hands, as one after one the pretty emblems 
unfolded themselves. She danced about, not with light love 
or foolish expectations, for she had no lover ; or, if she had, 
none she knew that could have created those bright images 
which delighted her. It was more like some fairy present; 
a God-send, as our familiarly pious ancestors termed a benefit 
received where the benefactor was unknown. It would do 
her no harm. It would do her good for ever after. It is 
good to love the unknown. I only give this as a speci- 
men of E. B. and his modest way of doing a concealed 
kindness. 

1 "Iris had dipt the woof," Paradise Lost, xi. 244. 



82 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

Good morrow to my Valentine, sings poor Ophelia ; ^ 
and no better wish, but with better auspices, we wish to all 
faithful lovers, who are not too wise to despise old legends, 
but are content to rank themselves humble diocesans of old 
Bishop Valentine and his true church. 



MY RELATIONS 

I AM arrived at that point of life at which a man may 
account it a blessing, as it is a singularity, if he have either of 
his parents surviving. I have not that felicity — and some- 
times think feelingly of a passage in ''Browne's Christian 
Morals," where he speaks of a man that hath lived sixty or 
seventy years in the world. "In such a compass of time,'' 
he says, "a man may have a close apprehension what it is 
to be forgotten, when he hath lived to find none who could 
remember his father, or scarcely the friends of his youth, and 
may sensibly see with what a face in no long time Oblivion 
will look upon himself." 

I had an aunt, a dear and good one. She was one whom 
single blessedness had soured to the world. She often used 
to say, that I was the only thing in it which she loved ; and, 
when she thought I was quitting it, she grieved over me with 
mother's tears. A partiality quite so exclusive my reason 
cannot altogether approve. She was from morning till 
night poring over good books and devotional exercises. Her 
favorite volumes were ''Thomas a Kempis," in Stanhope's 
translation; and a Roman Catholic Prayer Book, with the 

* She loves Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, and through a series of 
unfortunate happenings becomes insane, finally drowning herself. 
In Hamlet, iv. 5, she sings: 

" Tomorrow is Saint Valentine's day 
All in the morning betime. 
And I a maid at your window 
To be your Valentine." 



MY RELATIONS 83 

matins ^ and complines ^ regularly set down — terms which I 
was at that time too young to understand. She persisted in 
reading them, although admonished daily concerning their 
Papistical tendency; and went to church every Sabbath, as 
a good Protestant should do. These were the only books 
she studied ; though, I think, at one period of her life, she told 
me, she had read with great satisfaction the '^ Adventures 
of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman.'' Finding the door 
of the chapel in Essex Street open one day — it was in the 
infancy of that heresy — she went in, liked the sermon, and 
the manner of worship, and frequented it at intervals for 
some time after. She came not for doctrinal points, and 
never missed them. With some little asperities in her con- 
stitution, which I have above hinted at, she was a steadfast, 
friendly being, and a fine old Christian. She was a woman of 
strong sense, and a shrewd mind — extraordinary at a repartee; 
one of the few occasions of her breaking silence — else she 
did not much value wit. The only secular employment I 
remember to have seen her engaged in, was the splitting of 
French beans, and dropping them into a china basin of 
fair water. The odor of those tender vegetables to this day 
comes back upon my sense, redolent of soothing recollections. 
Certainly it is the most delicate of culinary operations. 

Male aunts, as somebody calls them, I had none — to re- 
member. By the uncle's side, I may be said to have been 
born an orphan. Brother, or sister, I never had any — to 
know them. A sister, I think, that should have been Eliza- 
beth, died in both our infancies. What a comfort, or what a 
care, may I not have missed in her ! — But I have cousins 
sprinkled about in Hertfordshire — besides two, with whom 
I have been all my life in habits of the closest intimacy, and 
whom I may term cousins par excellence. These are James 
and Bridget Elia. They are older than myself by twelve, and 
ten, years ; and neither of them seems disposed, in matters of 
advice and guidance, to waive any of the prerogatives which 
primogeniture confers. May they continue still in the same 

^ The morning service, and the last prayer at night. 



84 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

mind; and when they shall be seventy-five, and seventy- 
three, years old (I cannot spare them sooner), persist in treat- 
ing me in my grand climacteric precisely as a stripling, or 
younger brother ! 

James is an inexplicable cousin. Nature hath her unities, 
which not every critic can penetrate ; or, if we feel, we cannot 
explain them. The pen of Yorick, and of none since his, could 
have drawn J. E. entire — those fine Shandean lights and 
shades, which make up his story. I must limp after in my 
poor antithetical manner, as the fates have given me grace 
and talent. J. E. then — to the eye of a common observer 
at least — seemeth made up of contradictory principles. 
The genuine child of impulse, the frigid philosopher of pru- 
dence — the phlegm of my cousin's doctrine, is invariably at 
war with his temperament, which is high sanguine. With 
always some fire-new project in his brain, J. E. is the sys- 
tematic opponent of innovation, and crier-down of everything 
that has not stood the test of age and experiment. With 
a hundred fine notions chasing one another hourly in his fancy, 
he is startled at the least approach to the romantic in others ; 
and, determined by his own sense in everything, commends 
you to the guidance of common sense on all occasions. — 
With a touch of the eccentric in all which he does or says, he 
is only anxious that you should not commit yourself by doing 
anything absurd or singular. On my once letting slip at table, 
that I was not fond of a certain popular dish, he begged me at 
any rate not to say so — for the world would think me mad. 
He disguises a passionate fondness for works of high art 
(whereof he hath amassed a choice collection), under the 
pretext of buying only to sell again — that his enthusiasm 
may give no encouragement to yours. Yet, if it were so, 
why does that piece of tender, pastoral Domenichino hang 
still by his wall ? — is the ball of his sight much more dear to 
him ? — or what picture-dealer can talk like him ? 

Whereas mankind in general are observed to warp their 
speculative conclusions to the bent of their individual hu- 
mors, his theories are sure to be in diametrical opposition 
to his constitution. He is courageous as Charles of Sweden, 



MY RELATIONS 85 

upon instinct; chary of his person, upon principle, as a 
traveUing Quaker. He has been preaching up to me, all my 
life, the doctrine of bowing to the great — the necessity of 
forms, and manner, to a man^s getting on in the world. He 
himself never aims at either, that I can discover, — and has 
a spirit that would stand upright in the presence of the Cham 
of Tartary. It is pleasant to hear him discourse of patience 

— extolling it as the truest wisdom — and to see him dur- 
ing the last seven minutes that his dinner is getting ready. 
Nature never ran up in her haste a more restless piece of 
workmanship than when she moulded this impetuous cousin 

— and Art never turned out a more elaborate orator than he 
can display himself to be, upon his favorite topic of the 
advantages of quiet and contentedness in the state, whatever 
it be, that we are placed in. He is triumphant on this theme, 
when he has you safe in one of those short stages that ply for 
the western road, in a very obstructing manner, at the foot 
of John Murray's Street — where you get in when it is empty, 
and are expected to wait till the vehicle hath completed her 
just freight — a trying three quarters of an hour to some 
people. He wonders at your fidgetiness, — '' Where could we 
be better than we are, thus sitting, thus consulting ?'' ^ — 
'^ prefers, for his part, a state of rest to locomotion,'' — with 
an eye all the while upon the coachman, — till at length, 
waxing out of all patience, at your want of it, he breaks out 
into a pathetic remonstrance at the fellow for detaining us so 
long over the time which he had professed, and declares 
peremptorily, that "the gentleman in the coach is determined 
to get out, if he does not drive on that instant." 

Very quick at inventing an argument, or detecting a sophis- 
try, he is incapable of attending you in any chain of arguing. 
Indeed, he makes wild work with logic ; and seems to jump 
at most admirable conclusions by some process not at all 
a,kin to it. Consonantly enough to this, he hath been heard 
to deny, upon certain occasions, that there exists such a 
faculty at all in man as reason; and wondereth how rnan 
came first to have a conceit of it — enforcing his negation 

1 Paradise Lost, ii. 164. 



86 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

with all the might of reasoning he is master of. He has some 
speculative notions against laughter, and will maintain that 
laughing is not natural to him — when peradventure the 
next moment his lungs shall crow like chanticleer. He says 
some of the best things in the world — and declareth that wit 
is his aversion. It was he who said, upon seeing the Eton 
boys at play in their grounds — What a pity to think that 
these fine ingenuous lads in a few years will all be changed into 
frivolous Members of Parliament ! 

His youth was fiery, glowing, tempestuous — and in age 
he discovereth no symptom of cooling. This is that which 
I admire in him. I hate people who meet Time half way. 
I am for no compromise with that inevitable spoiler. While 
he lives, J. E. will take his swing. — It does me good, as I 
walk towards the street of my daily avocation, on some fine 
May morning, to meet him marching in a quite opposite 
direction, with a jolly handsome presence, and shining san- 
guine face, that indicates some purchase in his eye — a 
Claude — or a Hobbima — for much of his enviable leisure 
is consumed at Christie's and Phillips's — or where not, to 
pick up pictures, and such gauds. On these occasions he 
mostly stoppeth me, to read a short lecture on the advantage 
a person like me possesses above himself, in having his time 
occupied with business which he must do — assureth me that 
he often feels it hang heavy on his hands — wishes he had 
fewer holidays — and goes off — Westward Ho ! — chanting 
a tune, to Pall Mall — perfectly convinced that he has con- 
vinced me — while I proceed in my opposite direction tune- 
less. 

It is pleasant, again, to see this Professor of Indifference 
doing the honors of his new purchase, when he has fairly 
housed it. You must view it in every light, till he has found 
the best — placing it at this distance, and at that, but always 
suiting the focus of your sight to his own. You must spy at 
it through your fingers, to catch the aerial perspective — 
though you assure him that to you the landscape shows much 
more agreeable without that artifice. Woe be to the luckless 
wight who does not only not respond to his rapture, but who 



MY RELATIONS 87 

should drop an unseasonable intimation of preferring one of 
his anterior bargains to the present ! — The last is always his 
best hit — his " Cynthia of the minute/' ^ — Alas ! how many 
a mild Madonna have I known to come in — a Raphael ! — 
keep its ascendency for a few brief moons — then, after 
certain intermedial degradations, from the front drawing- 
room to the back gallery, thence to the dark parlor, — 
adopted in turn by each of the Carracci, under successive 
lowering ascriptions of filiation, mildly breaking its fall — 
consigned to the oblivious lumber-room, go out at last a Lucca 
Giordano, or plain Carlo Maratti ! — which things when I 
beheld — musing upon the chances and mutabilities of fate 
below, hath made me to reflect upon the altered condition of 
great personages, or that woeful Queen of Richard the 
Second — 

set forth in pomp, 

She came adorned hither like sweet May ; 

Sent back like Hallowmass or shortest day.^ 

With great love for you, J. E. hath but a limited sympathy 
with what you feel or do. He lives in a world of his own, and 
makes slender guesses at what passes in your mind. He 
never pierces the marrow of your habits. He will tell an old- 
established playgoer, that Mr. Such-a-one, of So-and-so 
(naming one of the theatres), is a very lively comedian — 
as a piece of news ! He advertised me but the other day of 
some pleasant green lanes which he had found out for me, 
knowing me to he a great walker, in my own immediate vicinity 
— who have haunted the identical spot any time these twenty 
years ! — He has not much respect for that class of feelings 
which goes by the name of sentimental. He applies the 
definition of real evil to bodily sufferings exclusively — and 
rejecteth all others as imaginary. He is affected by the 

^ Cynthia: the goddess of the moon. The qtiotation is a recol- 
lection of Pope's Epistle to Martha Blount, 17-20: — 

" Choose a firm cloud before it fall, and in it 
Catch, e'er she change, the Cynthia of this minute." 

2 Richard II, v. 1. 80. 



88 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 



■ 



sight, or the bare supposition, of a creature in pain, to a 
degree which I have never witnessed out of womankind. 
A constitutional acuteness to this class of sufferings may in 
part account for this. The animal tribe in particular he tak- 
eth under his especial protection. A broken-winded or 
spur-galled horse is sure to find an advocate in him. An 
over-loaded ass is his client for ever. He is the apostle to the 
brute kind — the never-failing friend of those who have none 
to care for them. The contemplation of a lobster boiled, or 
eels skinned alive, will wring him so, that "all for pity he 
could die." ^ It will take the savor fr©m his palate, and 
the rest from his pillow, for days and nights. With the in- 
tense feeling of Thomas Clarkson, he wanted only the steadi- 
ness of pursuit, and unity of purpose, of that 'Hrue yoke- 
fellow with Time," ^ t(3 have effected as much for the Animal 
as he hath done for the Negro Creation. But my uncon- 
trollable cousin is but imperfectly formed for purposes which 
demand cooperation. He cannot wait. His amelioration- 
plans must be ripened in a day. For this reason he has cut 
but an equivocal figure in benevolent societies, and combi- 
nations for the alleviation of human sufferings. His zeal 
constantly makes him to outrun, and put out, his coadjutors. 
He thinks of relieving, — while they think of debating. 
He was black-balled out of a society for the Relief of ... ^ 
because the fervor of his humanity toiled beyond the formal 
apprehension and creeping processes of his associates. I 
shall always consider this distinction as a patent of nobility in 
the Elia family ! 

Do I mention these seeming inconsistencies to smile at, or 
upbraid, my unique cousin? Marry, heaven, and all good 
manners, and the understanding that should be between 
kinsfolk, forbid ! — With all the strangenesses of this strang- 
est of the Elias — I would not have him in one jot or tittle 
other than he is ; neither would I barter or exchange my wild 

^ Spenser's Faerie Queene, i. 3. 1. 

2 Wordsworth's Sonnet on Clarkson. 

3 According to Lamb the fifteen asterisks in the original edition 
of the essay stood for "Distrest Sailors." 



MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE 89 

kinsman for the most exact, regular, and every way consistent 
kinsman breathing. 

In my next, Reader, I may perhaps give you some account 
of my cousin Bridget — if you are not already surfeited with 
cousins — and take you by the hand, if you are willing to go 
with us, on an excursion which we made a summer or two 
since, in search of more cousins — ■ 

Through the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire.* 



MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE 

Bridget Elia has been my housekeeper for many a long 
year. I have obligations to Bridget, extending beyond the 
period of memory. We house together, old bachelor and 
maid, in a sort of double singleness; with such tolerable 
comfort, upon the whole, that I, for one, find in myself no sort 
of disposition to go out upon the mountains, with the rash 
king's offspring,^ to bewail my celibacy. We agree pretty 
well in our tastes and habits — yet so, as ''with a difference." 
We are generally in harmony, with occasional bickerings — 
as it should be among near relations. Our sympathies are 
rather understood than expressed; and once, upon my dis- 
sembling a tone in my voice more kind than ordinary, my 
cousin burst into tears, and complained that I was altered. 
We are both great readers in different directions. While I 
am hanging over (for the thousandth time) some passage in 
old Burton, or one of his strange contemporaries, she is 
abstracted in some modern tale or adventure, whereof our 

* A line in one of Lamb's early sonnets. Mr. Lucas thinks it is 
a recollection of a line from a poem by William Vallons: — 

"The fruitful fields of pleasant Hertfordshire." 

2 A rather far-fetched allusion to the daughter of Jephthah, 
Judge of Israel, who vowed to sacrifice the first thing he should 
meet coming out of his house on his return from battle, if he were 
successful. His daughter was the first to greet him. Judges xi. 
30-40. 



90 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

common reading-table is daily fed with assiduously fresh 
supplies. Narrative teases me. I have little concern in the 
progress of events. She must have a story — well, ill, or 
indifferently told — so there be life stirring in it, and plenty 
of good or evil accidents. The fluctuations of fortune in 
fiction — and almost in real life — have ceased to interest, 
or operate but dully upon me. Out-of-the-way humors 
and opinions — heads with some diverting twist in them — 
the oddities of authorship, please me most. My cousin has 
a native disrelish of anything that sounds odd or bizarre. 
Nothing goes down with her that is quaint, irregular, or out 
of the road of common sympathy. She "holds Nature more 
clever.'' ^ I can pardon her blindness to the beautiful ob- 
liquities of the Religio Medici ; but she must apologize to me 
for certain disrespectful insinuations, which she has been 
pleased to throw out latterly, touching the intellectuals of 
a dear favorite of mine, of the last century but one — the 
thrice noble, chaste, and virtuous, but again somewhat 
fantastical and original brained, generous Margaret New- 
castle. 

It has been the lot of my cousin, oftener perhaps than I 
could have wished, to have had for her associates and mine, 
free-thinkers — leaders, and disciples, of novel philosophies 
and systems ; but she neither wrangles with, nor accepts, their 
opinions. That which was good and venerable to her, when 
a child, retains its authority over her mind still. She never 
juggles or plays tricks with her understanding. 

We are both of us inclined to be a little too positive ; and 
I have observed the result of our disputes to be almost uni- 
formly this — that in matters of fact, dates, and circum- 
stances, it turns out that I was in the right, and my cousin 
in the wrong. But where we have differed upon moral points ; 
upon something proper to be done, or let alone ; whatever heat 
of opposition or steadiness of conviction I set out with, I am 
sure always, in the long run, to be brought over to her way of 
thinking. 

I must touch upon the foibles of my kinswoman with a 

^ Gray's Epitaph of By-Words. 



MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE 9l 

gentle hand, for Bridget does not like to be told of her faults. 
She hath an awkward trick (to say no worse of it) of reading 
in company: at which times she will answer yes or no to a 
question, without fully understanding its purport — which is 
provoking, and derogatory in the highest degree to the dignity 
of the putter of the said question. Her presence of mind is 
equal to the most pressing trials of life, but will sometimes 
desert her upon trifling occasions. When the purpose requires 
it, and is a thing of moment, she can speak to it greatly ; but 
in matters which are not stuff of the conscience, she hath been 
known sometimes to let slip a word less seasonably. 

Her education in youth was not much attended to; and 
she happily missed all that train of female garniture which 
passeth by the name of accomplishments. She was tumbled 
early, by accident or design, into a spacious closet of good 
old English reading, without much selection or prohibition, 
and browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage. 
Had I twenty girls, they should be brought up exactly in 
this fashion. I know not whether their chance in wedlock 
might not be diminished by it ; but I can answer for it that 
it makes (if the worst come to the worst) most incomparable 
old maids. 

In a season of distress, she is the truest comforter; but 
in the teasing accidents and minor perplexities, which 
do not call out the will to meet them, she sometimes maketh 
matters worse by an excess of participation. If she does 
not always divide your trouble, upon the pleasanter occa- 
sions of life she is sure always to treble your satisfaction. 
She is excellent to be at a play with, or upon a visit; but 
best, when she goes a journey with you. 

We raade an excursion together a few summers since 
into Hertfordshire, to beat up the quarters of some of our 
less-known relations in that fine corn country. 

The oldest thing I remember is Mackery End, or Mackarel 
End, as it is spelt, perhaps more properly, in some old maps 
of Hertfordshire ; a farm-house, — delightfully situated 
within a gentle walk from Wheathampstead. I can just 
remember having been there, on a visit to a great-aunt. 



92 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

when I was a child, under the care of Bridget; who, as I 
have said, is older than myself by some ten years. I wish 
that I could throw into a heap the remainder of our joint 
existences, that we might share them in equal division. 
But that is impossible. The house was at that time in the 
occupation of a substantial yeoman, who had married my 
grandmother's sister. His name was Gladman. My grand- 
mother was a Bruton, married to a Field. The Gladmans 
and the Brutons are still flourishing in that part of the county, 
but the Fields are almost extinct. More than forty years 
had elapsed since the visit I speak of; and, for the greater 
portion of that period, we had lost sight of the other two 
branches also. Who or what sort of persons inherited 
Mackery End — kindred or strange folk — we were afraid 
almost to conjecture, but determined some day to explore. 

By somewhat a circuitous route, taking the noble park 
at Luton in our way from St. Albans, we arrived at the 
spot of our anxious curiosity about noon. The sight of 
the old farm-house, though every trace of it was effaced 
from my recollections, affected me with a pleasure which 
I had not experienced for many a year. For though / 
had forgotten it, we had never forgotten being there together, 
and we had been talking about Mackery End all our lives, 
till memory on my part became mocked with a phantom 
of itself, and I thought I knew the aspect of a place which, 
when present, O how unlike it was to that which I had con- 
jured up so many times instead of it ! 

Still the air breathed balmily about it; the season was 
in the "heart of June,"^ and I could say with the poet. 

But thou, that didst appear so fair 

To fond imagination, 
Dost rival in the light of day 

Her delicate creation ! ^ 

Bridget's was more a waking bliss than mine, for she 
easily remembered her old acquaintance again — some 

^ Ben Jonson's Epithalamium for Mrs. John Weston. 
2 Wordsworth's Yarrow Visited. 



MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE 93 

altered features, of course, a little grudged at. At first, 
indeed, she was ready to disbelieve for joy; but the scene 
soon re-confirmed itself in her affections — and she traversed 
every outpost of the old mansion, to the wood-house, the 
orchard, the place where the pigeon-house had stood (house 
and birds were alike flown) — with a breathless impatience 
of recognition, which was more pardonable perhaps than 
decorous at the age of fifty odd. But Bridget in some things 
is behind her years. 

The only thing left was to get into the house — and 
that was a difficulty which to me singly would have been 
insurmountable; for I am terribly shy in making myself 
known to strangers and out-of-date kinsfolk. Love, stronger 
than scruple, winged my cousin in without me; but she 
soon returned with a creature that might have sat to a 
sculptor for the image of Welcome. It was the youngest 
of the Gladmans; who, by marriage with a Bruton, had 
become mistress of the old mansion. A comely brood 
are the Brutons. Six of them, females, were noted as 
the handsomest young women in the county. But this 
adopted Bruton, in my mind, was better than they all — 
more comely. She was born too late to have remembered 
me. She just recollected in early life to have had her cousin 
Bridget once pointed out to her, climbing a stile. But 
the name of kindred and of cousinship was enough. Those 
slender ties, that prove slight as gossamer in the rending 
atmosphere of a metropolis, bind faster, as we found it, 
in hearty, homely, loving Hertfordshire. In five minutes 
we were as thoroughly acquainted as if we had been born 
and bred up together ; were familiar, even to the calling each 
other by our Christian names. So Christians should call 
one another. To have seen Bridget and her — it was like 
the meeting of the two scriptural cousins ! ^ There was a 
grace and dignity, an amplitude of form and stature, answer- 
ing to her mind, in this farmer's wife, which would have 
shined in a palace — or so we thought it. We were made 

* The Virgin Mary and Elizabeth, the mother of John the- Baptist, 



94 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

welcome by husband and wife equally — we, and our frienc 
that was with us. — I had almost forgotten him — but 
B. F. will not so soon forget that meeting, if peradventure 
he shall read this on the far distant shores where the kan- 
garoo haunts. The fatted calf was made ready, or rather 
was already so, as if in anticipation of our coming; and, 
after an appropriate glass of native wine, never let me 
forget with what honest pride this hospitable cousin made 
us proceed to Wheathampstead, to introduce us (as some 
new-found rarity) to her mother and sister Gladmans, 
who did indeed know something more of us, at a time when 
she almost knew nothing. — With what corresponding 
kindness we were received by them also — how Bridget^s 
memory, exalted by the occasion, warmed into a thousand 
half-obliterated recollections of things and persons, to my 
utter astonishment, and her own — and to the astoundment 
of B. F. who sat by, almost the only thing that was not a 
cousin there, — old effaced images of more than half -forgotten 
names and circumstances still crowding back upon her, as 
words written in lemon come out upon exposure to a friendly 
warmth, — when I forget all this, then may my country 
cousins forget me; and Bridget no more remember, that 
in the days of weakling infancy I was her tender charge — 
as I have been her care in foolish manhood since — in those 
pretty pastoral walks, long ago, about Mackery End, in 
Hertfordshire. 



THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE 

I WAS born, and passed the first seven years of my life, 
in the Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its foun- 
tain, its river, I had almost said — for in those young 
years, what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that 
watered our pleasant places ? — these are of my oldest rec- 
ollections. I repeat, to this day, no verses to myself more 



THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE 95 

~\, 

freqjaently, or with kindlier emotion, than those of Spenser 
where he speaks of this spot : — 

There when they came, whereas those bricky towers, 
The which on Themmes brode aged back doth ride, 
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers, 
There whylome wont the Templer knights to bide, 
Till they decayed through pride.^ 

Indeed, it is the most elegant spot in the metropolis. 
What a transition for a countryman visiting London for 
the first time — the passing from the crowded Strand or 
.Fleet Street, by unexpected avenues, into its magnificent 
ample squares, its classic green recesses! What a cheer- 
ful, liberal look hath that portion of it, which, from three 
sides, overlooks the greater garden; that goodly pile 

Of building strong, albeit of Paper hight,^ 

confronting, with massy contrast, the lighter, older, more 
fantastically-shrouded one, named of Harcourt, with the 
cheerful Crown-Office-Row (place of my kindly engendure), 
right opposite the stately stream, which washes the garden- 
foot with her yet scarcely trade-polluted waters, and seems 
but just weaned from her Twickenham Naiades! a man 
would give something to have been born in such places. 
What a collegiate aspect has that fine Elizabethan hall, 
where the fountain plays, which I have made to rise and 
fall, how many times ! to the astoundment of the young 
urchins, my contemporaries, who, not iDeing able to guess 
at its recondite machinery, were almost tempted to hail 
the wondrous work as magic ! What an antique air had 
the now almost effaced sun-dials, with their moral inscrip- 
tions, seeming coevals with that Time which they measured, 
and to take their revelations of its flight immediately from 
heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain of fight! 
How would the dark line steal imperceptibly on, watched 
by the eye of childhood, eager to detect its movement, 

^ Spenser's Prothalamion, 8. 

2 An improvised "quotation," referring to Paper Buildings, 
facing King's Bench Walk in the Temple. 



96 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

never catched, nice as an evanescent cloud, or the first 
arrests of sleep ! 

Ah I yet doth beauty like a dial hand 
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived ! * 

What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous em- 
bowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dulness 
of communication, compared with the simple altar-like 
structure and silent heart-language of the old dial ! It 
stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it 
almost everywhere vanished? If its business-use be super- 
seded by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, its 
beauty, might have pleaded for its continuance. It spoke 
of moderate labors, of pleasures not protracted after sun- 
set, of temperance, and good hours. It was the primitive 
clock, the horologe of the first world. Adam could scarce 
have missed it in Paradise. It was the measure appropriate 
for sweet plants and flowers to spring by, for the birds 
to apportion their silver warblings by, for flocks to pasture 
and be led to fold by. The shepherd " carved it out quaintly 
in the sun ; " ^ and, turning philosopher by the very occu- 
pation, provided it with mottoes more touching than tomb- 
stones. It was a pretty device of the gardener, recorded 
by Marvell, who, in the days of artificial gardening, made 
a dial out of herbs and flowers. I must quote his verses 
a little higher up, fgr they are full, as all his serious poetry 
was, of a witty delicacy. They will not come in awkwardly, 
I hope, in a talk of fountains and sun-dials. He is speaking 
of sweet garden scenes: — 

What wondrous life is this I lead ! 
Ripe apples drop about my head. 
The luscious clusters of the vine 
Upon my mouth do crush their wine. 
The nectarine, and curious peach, 
Into my hands themselves do reach. 
Stumbling on melons, as I pass, 
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass. 

^ Shakespeare's Sonnets, civ. 

2 An adaptation from 3 Henry VI, ii. 5. 21-24 



THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE 97 

Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less 

Withdraws into its happiness. 

The mind, that ocean, where each kind 

Does straight its own resemblance find; 

Yet it creates, transcending these, 

Far other worlds and other seas ; 

Annihilating all that's made 

To a green thought in a green shade. 

Here at the fountain's sliding foot 

Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root, 

Casting the body's vest aside, 

My soul into the boughs does glide; 

There, like a bird, it sits and sings. 

Then whets and claps its silver wings. 

And, till prepared for longer flight. 

Waves in its plumes the various light. 

How well the skilful gardener drew, 

Of flowers and herbs, this dial new ! 

Where, from above, the milder sun 

Does through a fragrant zodiac run : 

And, as it works, the industrious bee 

Computes its time as well as we. 

How could such sweet and wholesome hours 

Be reckoned, but with herbs and flowers ? ^ 

The artificial fountains of the metropolis are, in like 
manner, fast vanishing. Most of them are dried up or 
bricked over. Yet, where one is left, as in that little green 
nook behind the South-Sea House, what a freshness it 
gives to the dreary pile ! Four little winged marble boys 
used to play their virgin fancies, spouting out ever fresh 
streams from their innocent-wanton lips, in the square 
of Lincoln's Inn, when I was no bigger than they were 
figured. They are gone, and the spring choked up. The 
fashion, they tell me, is gone by, and these things are es- 
teemed childish. Why not, then, gratify children, by 
letting them stand? Lawyers, I suppose, were children 
once. They are awakening images to them at least. Why 
must everything smack of man, and mannish? Is the 
world all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or is there 
not in the bosoms of the wisest and the best some of the 

^ From a copy of verses entitled "The Garden." [Lamb's note.] 



98 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 



n 



child's heart left, to respond to its earUest enchantments? 
The figures were grotesque. Are the stiff-wigged Hving 
figures, that still flitter and chatter about that area, less 
Gothic in appearance ? or is the splutter of their hot rhetoric 
one half so refreshing and innocent as the little cool playful 
streams those exploded cherubs uttered? 

They have lately gothicized the entrance to the Inner 
Temple-hall, and the library front; to assimilate them, I 
suppose, to the body of the hall, which they do not at all 
resemble. What is become of the winged horse that stood 
over the former? a stately arms! and who has removed 
those frescoes of the Virtues, which Italianized the end 
of the Paper-buildings ? — my first hint of allegory ! They 
must account to me for these things, which I miss so 
greatly. 

The terrace is, indeed, left, which we used to call the 
parade; but the traces are passed away of the footsteps 
which made its pavement awful ! It is become common 
and profane. The old benchers had it almost sacred to 
themselves, in the forepart of the day at least. They might 
not be sided or jostled. Their air and dress asserted the 
parade. You left wide spaces betwixt you, when you passed 
them. We walk on even terms with their successors. The 

roguish eye of J 11, ever ready to be delivered of a jest, 

almost invites a stranger to vie a repartee with it. But 
what insolent familiar durst have mated Thomas Coventry? 
— whose person was a quadrate, his step massy and ele- 
phantine, his face square as the lion's, his gait peremptory 
and path-keeping, indivertible from his way as a moving 
column, the scarecrow of his inferiors, the browbeater of 
equals and superiors, who made a solitude of children wher- 
ever he came, for they fled his insufferable presence, as they 
would have shunned an Elisha bear.^ His growl was as 
thunder in their ears, whether he spake to them in mirth 
or in rebuke ; his invitatory notes being, indeed, of all, the 
most repulsive and horrid. Clouds of snuff, aggravating 
the natural terrors of his speech, broke from each majestic 

1 Cf. 2 Kings ii. 23 £f. 



THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE 99 

nostril, darkening the air. He took it, not by pinches, 
but a palmful at once, — diving for it under the mighty 
flaps of his old-fashioned waistcoat pocket; his waistcoat 
red and angry, his coat dark rappee, tinctured by dye original, 
and by adjuncts, with buttons of obsolete gold. And so 
he paced the terrace. 

By his side a milder form was sometimes to be seen; the 
pensive gentility of Samuel Salt. They were coevals, 
and had nothing but that and their benchership in com- 
mon. In politics Salt was a whig, and Coventry a staunch 
tory. Many a sarcastic growl did the latter cast out — 
for Coventry had a rough spinous humor — at the political 
confederates of his associate, which rebounded from the 
gentle bosom of the latter like cannon-balls from wool. 
You could not ruffle Samuel Salt. 

S. had the reputation of being a very clever man, and of 
excellent discernment in the chamber practice of the law. 
I suspect his knowledge did not amount to much. When 
a case of difficult disposition of money, testamentary or 
otherwise, came before him, he ordinarily handed it over, 
with a few instructions, to his man Lovel, who was a quick 
little fellow, and would despatch it out of hand by the light 
of natural understanding, of which he had an uncommon 
share. It was incredible what repute for talents S. enjoyed 
by the mere trick of gravity. He was a shy man; a child 
might pose him in a minute — indolent and procrastinating 
.to the last degree. Yet men would give him credit for vast 
application, in spite of himself. He was not to be trusted 
with himself with impunity. He never dressed for a dinner- 
party but he forgot his sword — they wore swords then — 
or some other necessary part of his equipage. Lovel had his 
eye upon him on all these occasions, and ordinarily gave 
him his cue. If there was anything which he could speak 
unseasonably, he was sure to do it. — He was to dine at a 
relative's of the unfortunate Miss Blandy on the day of her 
execution ; — and L., who had a wary foresight of his probable 
hallucinations, before he set out, schooled him, with great 
anxiety, not in any possible manner to allude to her story 



100 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A 

that day. S. promised faithfully to observe the injunction. 
He had not been seated in the parlor, where the com- 
pany was expecting the dinner summons, four minutes, 
when, a pause in the conversation ensuing, he got up, looked 
out of window, and pulling down his ruffles — an ordinary 
motion with him — observed, ''it was a gloomy day," and 
added, ''Miss Blandy must be hanged by this time, I suppose." 
Instances of this sort were perpetual. Yet S. was thought 
by some of the greatest men of his time a fit person to be 
consulted, not alone in matters pertaining to the law, but 
in the ordinary niceties and embarrassments of conduct — 
from force of manner entirely. He never laughed. He had 
the same good fortune among the female world, — was a 
known toast with the ladies, and one or two are said to have 
died for love of him — I suppose, because he never trifled 
or talked gaflantry with, them, or paid them, indeed, hardly 
common attentions. He had a fine face and person, but 
wanted, methought, the spirit that should have shown them 
off with advantage to the women. His eye lacked lustre. — 

Not so, thought Susan P ; who, at the advanced age 

of sixty, was seen, in the cold evening time, unaccompanied, 

wetting the pavement of B d Row with tears that fell 

in drops which might be heard, because her friend had 
died that day — he, whom she had pursued with a hopeless 
passion for the last forty years — a passion which years 
could not extinguish or abate; nor the long-resolved, yet 
gently-enforced, puttings off of unrelenting bachelorhood, 

dissuade from its cherished purpose. Mild Susan P , 

thou hast now thy friend in heaven ! 

Thomas Coventry was a cadet of the noble family of that 
name. He passed his youth in contracted circumstances, 
which gave him early those parsimonious habits which in 
after life never forsook him; so that, with one windfall or 
another, about the time I knew him he was master of four 
or five hundred thousand pounds; nor did he look, or walk, 
worth a moidore less. He lived in a gloomy house opposite 
the pump in Serjeant's Inn, Fleet Street. J., the counsel, is 
doing self-imposed penance in it, for what reason I divine not, 



THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE 101 

at this day. C. had an agreeable seat at North Cray, where 
he seldom spent above a day or two at a time in the summer ; 
but preferred, during the hot months, standing at his window 
in this damp, close, v/ell-like mansion, to watch, as he said, 
''the maids drawing water all day long." I suspect he had 
his within-door reasons for the preference. Hie currus et 
arma fuere} He might think his treasures more safe. His 
house had the aspect of a strong box. C. was a close hunks 
— a hoarder rather than a miser — or, if a miser, none of the 
mad Elwes breed, who have brought discredit upon a char- 
acter which cannot exist without certain admirable points 
of steadiness and unity of purpose. One may hate a true 
miser, but cannot, I suspect, so easily despise him. By 
taking care of the pence, he is often enabled to part with the 
pounds, upon a scale that leaves us careless generous fellows 
halting at an immeasurable distance behind. C. gave away 
30,000 L at once in his lifetime to a blind charity. His house- 
keeping was severely looked after, but he kept the table of 
a gentleman. He would know who came in and who went out 
of his house, but his kitchen chimney was never suffered to 
freeze. 

Salt was his opposite in this, as in all — never knew what 
he was worth in the world ; and having but a competency for 
his rank, which his indolent habits were little calculated to 
improve, might have suffered severely if he had not had hon- 
est people about him. Lovel took care of everything. He 
was at once his clerk, his good servant, his dresser, his friend, 
his "flapper," his guide, stop-watch, auditor, treasurer. He' 
did nothing without consulting Lovel, or failed in anything 
without expecting and fearing his admonishing. He put 
himself almost too much in his hands, had they not been the 
purest in the world. He resigned his title almost to respect 
as a master, if L. could ever have forgotten for a moment that 
he was a servant. 

I knew this Lovel. He was a man of an incorrigible and 

^ A free adaptation from Vergil's Mneid, i. 16. Hie illius arma, 
Hie currus fuit, "Here she kept her arms and here her chariots"; 
said of Juno's especial care and protection of Carthage. 



102 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

losing honesty. A good fellow withal, and "would strike." ^ 
In the cause of the oppressed he never considered inequali- 
ties, or calculated the number of his opponents. He once 
wrested a sword out of the hand of a man of quality that had 
drawn upon him, and pommelled him severely with the hilt 
of it. The swordsman had offered insult to a female — an 
occasion upon which no odds against him could have pre- 
vented the interference of Lovel. He would stand next day 
bareheaded to the same person, modestly to excuse his inter- 
ference — for L. never forgot rank, where something better 
was not concerned. L. was the liveliest little fellow breath- 
ing, had a face as gay as Garrick's, whom he was said greatly to 
resemble (I have a portrait of him which confirms it), pos- 
sessed a fine turn for humorous poetry — next to Swift and 
Prior — moulded heads in clay or plaster of Paris to admira- 
tion, by the dint of natural genius merely; turned cribbage 
boards, and such small cabinet toys, to perfection ; took a 
hand at quadrille or bowls with equal facility; made punch 
better than any man of his degree in England ; had the mer- 
riest quips and conceits; and was altogether as brimful of 
rogueries and inventions as you could desire. He was a 
brother of the angle, moreover, and just such a free, hearty, 
honest companion as Mr. Izaak Walton would have chosen 
to go a-fishing with. I saw him in his old age and the decay 
of his faculties, palsy-smitten, in the last sad stage of human 
weakness — "a remnant most forlorn of what he was," — 
yet even then his eye would light up upon the mention of his 
favorite Garrick. He was greatest, he would say, in Bayes 
— "was upon the stage nearly throughout the whole perform- 
ance, and as busy as a bee." At intervals, too, he would 
speak of his former life, and how he came up a little boy from 
Lincoln, to go to service, and how his mother cried at parting 
with him, and how he returned, after some few years' absence, 
in his smart new livery, to see her, and she blest herself at 

iCf. King Lear, v. 3. 284; — 

" He's a good fellow, I can tell you that 
He'll strike and quickly, too." 



THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE lOo 

the change, and could hardly be brought to believe that it 
was "her own bairn." And then, the excitement subsiding, 
he would weep, till I have wished that sad second-childhood 
might have a mother still to lay its head upon her lap. But 
the common mother of us all in no long time after received 
him gently into hers. 

With Coventry and with Salt, in their walks upon the ter- 
race, most commonly Peter Pierson would join, to make up a 
third. They did not walk linked arm-in-arm in those days 
— "as now our stout triumvirs sweep the streets," — but 
generally with both hands folded behind them for state, or 
with one at least behind, the other carrying a cane. P. was 
a benevolent, but not a prepossessing man. He had that in 
his face which you could not term unhappiness; it rather 
implied an incapacity of being happy. His cheeks were 
colorless, even to whiteness. His look was uninviting, re- 
sembling (but without his sourness) that of our great philan- 
thropist.^ I know that he did good acts, but I could never 
make out what he was. Contemporary with these, but sub- 
ordinate, was Daines Barrington — another oddity — he 
walked burly and square — in imitation, I think, of Coven- 
try — howbeit he attained not to the dignity of his prototype. 
Nevertheless, he did pretty well, upon the strength of being 
a tolerable antiquarian, and having a brother a bishop. When 
the account of his year's treasurership came to be audited, the 
following singular charge was unanimously disallowed by the 
bench: "Item, disbursed Mr. Allen, the gardener, twenty 
shilhngs for stuff to poison the sparrows, by my orders." 
Next to him was old Barton — a jolly negation, who took 
upon him the ordering of the bills of fare for the parlia- 
ment chamber, where the benchers dine — answering to 
the combination rooms at College — much to the easement 
of his less epicurean brethren. I know nothing more of 
him. — Then Read, and Twopenny — Read, good-humored 
and personable — Twopenny, good-humored, but thin, and 

^ Conjectured to be either John Howard, the prison reformer, 
or Thomas Clarkson, the abolitionist. 



104 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

felicitous in jests upon his own figure. If T. was thin, 
Wharry was attenuated and fleeting. Many must re- 
member him (for he was rather of later date) and his singular 
gait, which was performed by three steps and a jump regu- 
larly succeeding The steps were little efforts, like that 
of a child beginning to walk; the jump comparatively vig- 
orous, as a foot to an inch. Where he learned this figure, 
or what occasioned it, I could never discover. It was neither 
graceful in itself, nor seemed to answer the purpose any 
better than common walking. The extreme tenuity of his 
frame, I suspect, set him upon it. It was a trial of poising. 
Twopenny would often rally him upon his leanness, and hail 
him as Brother Lusty; but W. had no relish of a joke. His 
features were spiteful. I have heard that he would pinch 
his cat's ears extremely when anything had offended him. 
Jackson ' — the omniscient Jackson, he was called — was of 
this period. He had the reputation of possessing more 
multifarious knowledge than any man of his time. He 
was the Friar Bacon of the less literate portion of the Temple. 
I remember a pleasant passage of the cook applying to him, 
with much formality of apology, for instructions how to 
write down edge bone of beef in his bill of commons. He 
was supposed to know, if any man in the world "did. He 
decided the orthography to be — as I have given it — 
fortifying his authority with such anatomical reasons as 
dismissed the manciple (for the time) learned and happy. 
Some do spell it yet, perversely, aitch bone, from a fanciful 
resemblance between its shape and that of the aspirate so 
denominated. I had almost forgotten Mingay with the 
iron hand — but he was somewhat later. He had lost his 
right hand by some accident, and supplied it with a grappling- 
hook, which he wielded with a tolerable adroitness. I de- 
tected the substitute before I was old enough to reason 
whether it were artificial or not. I remember the astonish- 
ment it raised in me. He was a blustering, loud-talking 
person ; and I reconciled the phenomenon to my ideas as an 
emblem of power — somewhat like the horns in the fore- 
head of Michael Angelo's Moses. Baron Maseres, who walks 



THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE 105 

(or did till very lately) in the costume of the reign of George 
the Second, closes my imperfect recollections of the old 
benchers of the Inner Temple. 

Fantastic forms, whither are ye fled? Or, if the like 
of you exist, why exist they no more for me? Ye inex- 
plicable, half-understood appearances, why comes in reason 
to tear away the preternatural mist, bright or gloomy, that 
enshrouded you? Why make ye so sorry a figure in my 
relation, who made up to me — to my childish eyes — the 
mythology of the Temple? In those days I saw Gods, as 
^'old men covered with a mantle,'' ^ walking upon the earth. 
Let the dreams of classic idolatry perish, — extinct be the 
fairies and fairy trumpery of legendary fabling, — in the heart 
of childhood there will, for ever, spring up a well of innocent 
or wholesome superstition — the seeds of exaggeration will 
be busy there, and vital — from every-day forms educing 
the unknown and the uncommon. In that little Goshen 
there will be light, when the grown world flounders about in 
the darkness of sense and materiality. While childhood, 
and while dreams, reducing childhood, shall be left, imagina- 
tion shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the 
earth. 

P.S. — I have done injustice to the soft shade of Samuel 
Salt. See what it is to trust to imperfect memory, and 
the erring notices of childhood! Yet I protest I always 
thought that he had been a bachelor! This gentleman, 
R. N. informs me, married young, and losing his lady in 
childbed, within the first year of their union, fell into a deep 
melancholy, from the effects of which, probably, he never 
thoroughly recovered. In what a new light does this place 
his rejection (O call it by a gentler name !) of mild Susan 

P , unravelling into beauty certain peculiarities of this 

very shy and retiring character! Henceforth let no one 
receive the narratives of Elia for true records! They are, 
in truth, but shadows of fact — verisimilitudes, not verities 
— or sitting but upon the remote edges and outskirts of 
^ 1 Samud xxviii. 14. 



106 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A 

history. He is no such honest chronicler as R. N., and 
would have done better perhaps to have consulted that 
gentleman before he sent these incondite reminiscences to 
press. But the worthy sub-treasurer — who respects his 
old and his new masters — would but have been puzzled at 
the indecorous liberties of Elia. The good man wots not, 
peradventure, of the licence which Magazines have arrived 
at in this plain-speaking age, or hardly dreams of their ex- 
istence beyond the Gentleman's — his furthest monthly 
excursions in this nature having been long confined to the 
holy ground of honest Urban's obituary. May it be long 
before his own name shall help to swell those columns of 
unenvied flattery ! — Meantime, ye New Benchers of the 
Inner Temple, cherish him kindly, for he is himself the 
kindliest of human creatures. Should infirmities overtake 
him — he is yet in green and vigorous senility — make 
allowances for them, remembering that ''ye yourselves are 
old." ^ So may the Winged Horse, your ancient badge and 
cognizance, still flourish! so may future Hookers and Seldens 
illustrate your church and chambers ! so may the sparrows, 
in default of more melodious quiristers, unpoisoned hop 
about your walks ! so may the fresh-colored and cleanly 
nursery-maid, who, by leave, airs her playful charge in your 
stately gardens, drop her prettiest blushing courtesy as ye 
pass, reductive of juvenescent emotion ! so may the younkers 
of this generation eye you, pacing your stately terrace, with 
the same superstitious veneration with which the child Elia 
gazed on the Old Worthies that solemnized the parade before 
ye! 



GRACE BEFORE MEAT 

The custom of saying grace at meals had, probably, its 
origin in the early times of the world, and the hunter-state 
of man, when dinners were precarious things, and a full 

^ An adaptation fronx KiTig Lear, ii. 4. 193-195. 



I 



GRACE BEFORE MEAT 107 

meal was something more than a common blessing! when 
a belly-full was a windfall, and looked like a special 
providence. In the shouts and triumphal songs with which, 
after a season of sharp abstinence, a lucky booty of deer's 
or goat's flesh would naturally be ushered home, existed, 
perhaps, the germ of the modern grace. It is not other- 
wise easy to be understood, why the blessing of food — the 
act of eating — should have had a particular expression of 
thanksgiving annexed to it, distinct from that implied and 
silent gratitude with which we are expected to enter upon 
the enjoyment of the many other various gifts and good 
things of existence. 

I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other 
occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I 
want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a 
moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. 
Why have we none for books, those spiritual repasts — a 
grace before Milton — a grace before Shakespeare — a 
devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the 
Fairy Queen? — but, the received ritual having prescribed 
these forms to the solitary ceremony of manducation, I shall 
confine my observations to the experience which I have had 
of the grace, properly so called; commending my new 
scheme for extension to a niche in the grand philosophical, 
poetical, and perchance in part heretical, liturgy, now com- 
piling by my friend Homo Humanus,^ for the use of a cer- 
tain snug congregation of Utopian Rabelsesian Christians, no 
matter where assembled. 

The form, then, of the benediction before eating has its 
beauty at a poor man's table, or at the simple and unpro- 
vocative repast of children. It is here that the grace be- 
comes exceedingly graceful. The indigent man, who hardly 
knows whether he shall have a meal the next day or not, 
sits down to his fare with a present sense of the blessing, 

1 "Human man/' is a literal translation, but it means mankind 
in general. Mr. Lucas suggests that the expression is a "glance 
at the abbey of Theleme founded by Gargantua for persons of sweet 
reasonableness." See Rabelais in the Index. 



108 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

which can be but feebly acted by the rich, into whose minds 
the conception of wanting a dinner could never, but by some 
extreme theory, have entered. The proper end of food — 
the animal sustenance — is barely contemplated by them. 
The poor man's bread is his daily bread, literally his bread 
for the day. Their courses are perennial. 

Again, the plainest diet seems the fittest to be preceded 
by the grace. That which is least stimulative to appetite, 
leaves the mind most free for foreign considerations. A 
man may feel thankful, heartily thankful, over a dish of 
plain mutton with turnips, and have leisure to reflect upon 
the ordinance and institution of eating; when he shall con- 
fess a perturbation of mind, inconsistent with the purposes 
of the grace, at the presence of venison or turtle. When 
I have sate (a rarus hospes ^) at rich men's tables, with 
the savory soup and messes steaming up the nostrils, and 
moistening the lips of the guests with desire and a distracted 
choice, I have felt the introduction of that ceremony to be 
unseasonable. With the ravenous orgasm upon you, it 
seems impertinent to interpose a religious sentiment. It 
is a confusion of purpose to mutter out praises from a mouth 
that waters. The heats of epicurism put out the gentle 
flame of devotion. The incense which rises round is pagan, 
and the belly-god intercepts it for his own. The very excess 
of the provision beyond the needs, takes away all sense of 
proportion between the end and means. The giver is veiled 
by his gifts. You are startled at the injustice of returning 
thanks — for what? — for having too much, while so many 
starve. It is to praise the Gods amiss. ^ 

I have observed this awkwardness felt, scarce consciously 
perhaps, by the good man who says the grace. I have seen 
it in clergymen and others — a sort of shame — a sense of 
the co-presence of circumstances which unhallow the bless- 
ing. After a devotional tone put on for a few seconds, 
how rapidly the speaker will fall into his common voice, 
helping himself or his neighbor, as if to get rid of some 

* An uncommon guest. 

2 Milton's Comus, 175-177. See explanatory note, p. 242. 



I 



GRACE BEFORE MEAT 109 

uneasy sensation of hypocrisy. Not that the good man was 
a hypocrite, or was not most conscientious in the discharge 
of the duty; but he felt in his inmost mind the incom- 
patibihty of the scene and the viands before him with the 
exercise of a calm and rational gratitude. 

I hear somebody exclaim, — Would you have Christians 
sit down at table, like hogs to their troughs, without re- 
membering the Giver? — no — I would have them sit down 
as Christians, remembering the Giver, and less like hogs. 
Or, if their appetites must run riot, and they must pamper 
themselves with dehcacies for which east and west are ran- 
sacked, I would have them postpone their benediction to 
a fitter season, when appetite is laid; when the still small 
voice can be heard, and the reason of the grace returns — 
with temperate diet and restricted dishes. Gluttony and 
surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanksgiving. When 
Jeshurun waxed fat,^ we read that he kicked. Virgil knew 
the harpy-nature better, when he put into the mouth of 
Celffino anything but a blessing. We may be gratefully 
sensible of the deliciousness of some kinds of food beyond 
others, though that is a meaner and inferior gratitude : but 
the proper object of the grace is sustenance, not rehshes; 
daily bread, not delicacies; the means of life, and not the 
means of pampering the carcass. With what frame or 
composure, I wonder, can a city chaplain pronounce his 
benediction at some great Hall feast, when he knows that 
his last concluding pious word — and that, in all probability, 
the sacred name which he preaches — is but the signal for 
so many impatient harpies to commence their foul orgies, 
with as little sense of true thankfulness (which is temperance) 
as those Vergilian fowl I It is well if the good man himself 
does not feel his devotions a little clouded, those foggy sensu- 
ous steams minghng with and polluting the pure altar 
sacrifice. 

The severest satire upon full tables and surfeits is the 

» Jeshurun, the righteous, was the symbolical name of Israel. 
■Deuteronomy xxxii. 15. 



110 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A 

banquet which Satan, in the "Paradise Regained," provides 
for a temptation in the wilderness : — 

A table richly spread in regal mode, 
With dishes piled, and meats of noblest sort 
And savor ; beasts of chase, or fowl of game, 
In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled, 
Gris-amber-steamed ; all fish from sea or shore, 
Freshet or purling brook, for which was drained 
Pontus, and Lucrine bay, and Afric coast.^ 

The Tempter, I warrant you, thought these cates would 
go down without the recommendatory preface of a bene- 
diction. They are like to be short graces where the devil 
plays the host. I am afraid the poet wants his usual de- 
corum in this place. Was he thinking of the old Roman 
luxury, or of a gaudy day at Cambridge ? This was a tempta- 
tion fitter for a Heliogabalus. The whole banquet is too 
civic and culinary, and the accompaniments altoget^ier a 
profanation of that deep, abstracted, holy scene. The 
mighty artillery of sauces, which the cook-fiend conjures 
up, is out of proportion to the simple wants and plain hunger 
of the guest. He that disturbed him in his dreams, from 
his dreams might have been taught better. To the temperate 
fantasies of the famished Son of God, what sort of feasts 
presented themselves ? — He dreamed indeed, 

As appetite is wont to dream. 

Of meats and drinks, nature's refreshment sweet.^ 

But what meats ? — 

Him thought he by the brook of Cherith stood, 

And saw the ravens with their horny beaks 

Food to Elijah bringing even and morn; 

Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought. 

He saw the prophet also how he fled 

Into the desert, and how there he slept 

Under a juniper; then how awaked 

He found his supper on the coals prepared, 

And by the angel was bid rise and eat, 

^ Paradise Regained, ii. 340-347. The passage describes the deli- 
cacies set before Christ by Satan. 
2 Paradise Regained, ii. 264-278. 



GRACE BEFORE MEAT 111 

And ate the second time after repose, 
The strength whereof sufficed him forty days: 
Sometimes, that with Elijah he partook, 
Or as a guest with Daniel at his pulse. 

Nothing in Milton is finelier fancied than these temperate 
dreams of the divine Hungerer. To which of these two 
visionary banquets, think you, would the introduction of 
what is called the grace have been the most fitting and 
pertinent ? 

Theoretically I am no enemy to graces; but practically 
I own that (before meat especially) they seem to involve 
something awkward and unseasonable. Our appetites, of 
one or another kind, are excellent spurs to our reason, which 
might otherwise but feebly set about the great ends of pre- 
serving and continuing the species. They are fit blessings 
to be contemplated at a distance with a becoming gratitude ; 
but the moment of appetite (the judicious reader will appre- 
hend me) is, perhaps, the least fit season for that exercise. 
The Quakers, who go about their business, of every description, 
with more calmness than we, have more title to the use of 
these benedictory prefaces. I have always admired their 
silent grace, and the more because I have observed their 
applications to the meat and drink following to be less pas- 
sionate and sensual than ours. They are neither gluttons 
nor wine-bibbers as a people. They eat, as a horse bolts his 
chopped hay, with indifference, calmness, and cleanly cir- 
cumstances. They neither grease nor slop themselves. 
When I see a citizen in his bib and tucker, I cannot 
imagine it a surplice. 

I am no Quaker at my food. I confess I am not indif- 
ferent to the kinds of it. Those unctuous morsels of deer's 
flesh were not made to be received with dispassionate ser- 
vices. I hate a man who swallows it, affecting not to know 
what he is eating. I suspect his taste in higher matters. I 
shrink instinctively from one who professes to like minced 
veal. There is a physiognomical character in the tastes for 

food. C holds that a man cannot have a pure mind 

who refuses apple-dumplings. I am not certain but he is 



112 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A 

right. With the decay of my first innocence, I confess a less 
and less relish daily for those innocuous cates. The whole 
vegetable tribe have lost their gust with me. Only I stick 
to asparagus, which still seems to inspire gentle thoughts. 
I am impatient and querulous under culinary disappoint- 
ments, as to come home at the dinner hour, for instance, 
expecting some savory mess, and to find one quite tasteless 
and sapidless. Butter ill melted — that commonest of 
kitchen failures — puts me beside my tenor. — The author 
of the Rambler used to make inarticulate animal noises over 
a favorite food. Was this the music quite proper to be 
preceded by the grace? or would the pious man have done 
better to postpone his devotions to a season when the blessing 
might be contemplated with less perturbation? I quarrel 
with no man's tastes, nor would set my thin face against 
those excellent things, in their way, jollity and feasting. 
But as these exercises, however laudable, have little in them 
of grace or gracefulness, a man should be sure, before he 
ventures so to grace them, that while he is pretending his 
devotions otherwhere, he is not secretly kissing his hand to 
some great fish — his Dagon — with a special consecration 
of no ark but the fat tureen before him. Graces are the sweet 
preluding strains to the banquets of angels and children; 
to the roots and severer repasts of the Chartreuse ; to the 
slender, but not slenderly acknowledged, refection of the poor 
and humble man : but at the heaped-up boards of the pam- 
pered and the luxurious they become of dissonant mood, 
less timed and tuned to the occasion, methinks, than the 
noise of those better befitting organs would be, which children 
hear tales of, at Hog's Norton. We sit too long at our meals, 
or are too curious in the study of them, or too disordered in 
our application to them, or engross too great a portion of 
those good things (which should be common) to our share, 
to be able with any grace to say grace. To be thankful for 
what we grasp exceeding our proportion, is to add hypocrisy 
to injustice. A lurking sense of this truth is what makes 
the performance of this duty so cold and spiritless a service 
at most' tables. In houses where the grace is as indispensable 



GRACE BEFORE MEAT 113 

as the napkin, who has not seen that never-settled question 
arise, as to who shall say it; while the good man of the house 
and the visitor clergyman, or some other guest belike of next 
authority from years or gravity, shall be bandying about 
the office between them as a matter of compliment, each of 
them not unwilling to shift the awkward burthen of an 
equivocal duty from his own shoulders? 

I once drank tea in company with two Methodist divines 
of different persuasions, whom it was my fortune to intro- 
duce to each other for the first time that evening. Before 
the first cup was handed round, one of these reverend gentle- 
men put it to the other, with all due solemnity, whether 
he chose to say anything. It seems it is the custom with 
some sectaries to put up a short prayer before this meal also. 
His reverend brother did not at first quite apprehend him, 
but upon an explanation, with little less importance he made 
answer that it was not a custom known in his church: in 
which courteous evasion the other acquiescing for good 
manners' sake, or in compliance with a weak brother, the 
supplementary or tea grace was waived altogether. With 
what spirit might not Lucian have painted two priests, of 
his religion, playing into each other's hands the compliment 
of performing or omitting a sacrifice, — the hungry God 
meantime, doubtful of his incense, with expectant nostrils 
hovering over the two flamens, and (as between two stools) 
going away in the end without his supper. 

A short form upon these occasions is felt to want reverence ; 
a long one, I am afraid, cannot escape the charge of im- 
pertinence. I do not quite approve of the epigrammatic 
conciseness with which that equivocal wag (but my pleasant 
school-fellow) C. V. L., when importuned for a grace, used 
to inquire, first slyly leering down the table, "Is there no 
clergyman here?" — significantly adding, "Thank G — ." 
Nor do I think our old form at school quite pertinent, where 
we were used to preface our bald bread-and-cheese-suppers 
with a preamble, connecting with that humble blessing a 
recognition of benefits the most awful and overwhelming 
to the imagination which religion has to offer. Non tunc 



114 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

illis erat locus} I remember we were put to it to reconcile 
the phrase ''good creatures," upon which the blessing rested, 
with the fare set before us, wilfully understanding that ex- 
pression in a low and animal sense, — till some one recalled 
a legend, which told how, in the golden days of Christ's, 
the young Hospitallers were wont to have smoking joints of 
roast meat upon their nightly boards, till some pious bene- 
factor, commiserating the decencies, rather than the palates, 
of the children, commuted our flesh for garments, and gave 
us — horresco referens ^ — trousers instead of mutton. 



DREAM-CHILDREN: A REVERIE 

Children love to listen to stories about their elders, 
when they were children; to stretch their imagination to 
the conception of a traditionary great-uncle, or grandame, 
whom they never saw. It was in this spirit that my little 
ones crept about me the other evening to hear about their 
great-grandmother Field, who lived in a great house in Nor- 
folk (a hundred times bigger than that in which they and 
papa lived) which had been the scene — so at least it was 
generally believed in that part of the country — of the tragic 
incidents which they had lately become familiar with from 
the ballad of the Children in the Wood. Certain it is that 
the whole story of the children and their cruel uncle was to 
be seen fairly carved out in wood upon the chimney-piece 
of the great hall, the whole story down to the Robin Red- 
breasts; till a foolish rich person pulled it down to set up 
a marble one of modern invention in its stead, with no story 
upon it. Here Alice put out one of her dear mother's looks, 
too tender to be called upbraiding. Then I went on to 
say, how religious and how good their great-grandmother 
Field was, how beloved and respected by everybody, though 

^ An imperfect recollection from Horace's Ars Poetica, 19, Sednunc 
non erat his locus : But that was not the occasion for such things^ 
2 I shudder at the recollection. Vergil's jEneid, ii. 204. 



dream-children: a reverie 115 

she was not indeed the mistress of this great house, but had 
only the charge of it (and yet in some respects she might be 
said to be the mistress of it too) committed to her by the 
owner, who preferred hving in a newer and more fashionable 
mansion which he had purchased somewhere in the adjoin- 
ing county ; but still she lived in it in a manner as if it had 
been her own, and kept up the dignity of the great house in 
a sort while she lived, which afterwards came to decay, and 
was nearly pulled down, and all its old ornaments stripped 
and carried away to the owner's other house, where they 
were set up, and looked as awkward as if some one were to 
carry away the old tombs they had seen lately at the Abbey, 
and stick them up in Lady C.'s tawdry gilt drawing-room. 
Here John smiled, as much as to say, ''that would be foolish 
indeed." And then I told how, when she came to die, her 
funeral was attended by a concourse of all the poor, and 
some of the gentry too, of the neighborhood for many miles 
round, to show their respect for her memory, because she 
had been such a good and religious woman; so good indeed 
that she knew all the Psaltery by heart, ay, and a great 
part of the Testament besides. Here little Alice spread 
her hands. Then I told what a tall, upright, graceful person 
their great-grandmother Field once was; and how in her 
youth she was esteemed the best dancer — here Alice's 
little right foot played an involuntary movement, till, upon 
my looking grave, it desisted — the best dancer, I was saying, 
in the county, till a cruel disease, called a cancer, came, 
and bowed her down with pain ; but it could never bend her 
good spirits, or make them stoop, but they were still upright, 
because she was so good and religious. Then I told how 
she was used to sleep by herself in a lone chamber of the 
great lone house; and how she believed that an apparition 
of two infants was to be seen at midnight gliding up and 
down the great staircase near where she slept, but she said 
'' those innocents would do her no harm ; " and how frightened 
I used to be, though in those days I had my maid to sleep 
with me, because I was never half so good or religious as 
she — and yet I never saw the infants. Here John expanded 



116 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

all his eyebrows and tried to look courageous. Then I told 
how good she was to all her grandchildren, having us to the 
great house in the holidays, where I in particular used to 
spend many hours by myself, in gazing upon the old busts 
of the twelve Caesars, that had been Emperors of Rome, 
till the old marble heads would seem to live again, or I to 
be turned into marble with them.; how I never could be tired 
with roaming about that huge mansion, with its vast empty 
rooms, with their worn-out hangings, fluttering tapestry, 
and carved oaken panels, with the gilding almost rubbed 
out — sometimes in the spacious old-fashioned gardens, 
which I had almost to myself, unless when now and then 
a solitary gardening man would cross me — and how the 
nectarines and peaches hung upon the walls, without my 
ever offering to pluck them, because they were forbidden 
fruit, unless now and then, — and because I had more 
pleasure in strolling about among the old melancholy-look- 
ing yew-trees, or the firs, and picking up the red berries, 
and the fir-apples, which were good for nothing but to look 
at — or in lying about upon the fresh grass with all the fine 
garden smells around me — or basking in the orangery, till 
I could almost fancy myself ripening too along with the 
oranges and the limes in that grateful warmth — or in watch- 
ing the dace that darted to and fro in the fish-pond, at the 
bottom of the garden, with here and there a great sulky 
pike hanging midway down the water in silent state, as if 
it mocked at their impertinent friskings, — I had more 
pleasure in these busy-idle diversions than in all the sweet 
flavors of peaches, nectarines, oranges, and such-like common 
baits of children. Here John slyly deposited back upon the 
plate a bunch of grapes, which, not unobserved by Alice, 
he had meditated dividing with her, and both seemed will- 
ing to relinquish them for the present as irrelevant. Then, 
in somewhat a more heightened tone, I told how, though 
their great-grandmother Field loved all her grandchildren, 
yet in an especial manner she might be said to love their 

uncle, John L , because he was so handsome and spirited 

a youth, and a king to the rest of us ; and, instead of moping 



dream-children: a reverie 117 

about in solitary corners, like some of us, he would mount 
the most mettlesome horse he could get, when but an imp no 
bigger than themselves, and make it carry him half over the 
county in a morning, and join the hunters when there were 
any out — and yet he loved the old great house and gardens 
too, but had too much spirit to be always pent up within 
their boundaries — and how their uncle grew up to man's 
estate as brave as he was handsome, to the admiration of 
everybody, but of their great-grandmother Field most es- 
pecially; and how he used to carry me upon his back when 
I was a lame-footed boy — for he was a good bit older than 
me — many a mile when I could not walk for pain ; — and 
how in after life he became lame-footed too, and I did not 
always (I fear) make allowances enough for him when he 
was impatient and in pain, nor remember sufficiently how 
considerate he had been to me when I was lame-footed ; 
and how when he died, though he had not been dead an hour, 
it seemed as if he had died a great while ago, such a distance 
there is betwixt life and death; and how I bore his death 
as I thought pretty well at first, but afterwards it haunted 
and haunted me; and though I did not cry or take it to 
heart as some do, and as I think he would have done if I had 
died, yet I missed him all day long, and knew not till then 
how much I had loved him. I missed his kindness, and I 
missed his crossness, and wished him to be alive again, 
to be quarrelling with him (for we quarrelled sometimes), 
rather than not have him again, and was as uneasy without 
him, as he, their poor uncle, must have been when the doctor 
took off his limb. — Here the children fell a-crying, and 
asked if their little mourning which they had on was not for 
uncle John, and they looked up, and prayed me not to go 
on about their uncle, but to tell them some stories about their 
pretty dead mother. Then I told how for seven long years, 
in hope sometimes, sometimes in despair, yet persisting ever, 

I courted the fair Alice W n; and, as much as children 

could understand, I explained to them what coyness, and 
difficulty, and denial meant in maidens — when suddenly 
turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice looked out at her 



118 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

eyes with such a reaUty of re-presentment, that I became in 
doubt which of them stood there before me, or whose that 
bright hair was ; and while I stood gazing, both the children 
gradually grew fainter to my view, receding, and still reced- 
ing, till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen 
in the uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely 
impressed upon me the effects of speech: "We are not of 
Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all. The children 
of Alice call Bartrum father. We are nothing; less than 
nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, 
and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions 
of ages before we have existence, and a name" — and im- 
mediately awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my 
bachelor arm-chair, where I had fallen asleep, with the faith- 
ful Bridget unchanged by my side — but John L. (or James 
Elia) was gone for ever. 



DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS 

IN A LETTER TO B. F., ESQ., AT SYDNEY, NEW SOUTH WALES 

My dear F. — When I think how welcome the sight of a 
letter from the world where you were born must be to you 
in that strange one to which you have been transplanted, 
I feel some compunctious visitings at my long silence. But, 
indeed, it is no easy effort to set about a correspondence at 
our distance. The weary world of waters between us op- 
presses the imagination. It is difficult to conceive how a 
scrawl of mine should ever stretch across it. It is a sort of 
presumption to expect that one's thoughts should live so 
far. It is like writing for posterity ; and reminds me of one 
of Mrs. Rowe's superscriptions, "Alcander to Strephon, in 
the Shades." Cowley's Post-AngeP is no more than would 

^ Cowley's Hymn to Light : — 

"Let a post-angel start with thee 
And thou the goal of earth shall reach as soon as he " 



DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS 119 

be expedient in such an intercourse. One drops a packet at 
Lombard Street, and in twenty-four hours a friend in Cum- 
berland gets it as fresh as if it came in ice. It is only like 
whispering through a long trumpet. But suppose a tube 
let down from the moon, with yourself at one end and the 
man at the other; it would be some balk to the spirit of 
conversation, if you knew that the dialogue exchanged with 
that interesting theosophist would take two or three revo- 
lutions of a higher luminary in its passage. Yet, for aught 
I know, you may be some parasangs nigher that primitive 
idea — Plato's man — than we in England here have the 
honor to reckon ourselves. 

Epistolary matter usually compriseth three topics; news, 
sentiment, and puns. In the latter, I include all non-serious 
subjects; or subjects serious in themselves, but treated after 
my fashion, non-seriously. — And first, for news. In them 
the most desirable circumstance, I suppose, is that they shall 
be true. But what security can I have that what I now 
send you for truth shall not, before you get it, unaccountably 
turn into a lie? For instance, our mutual friend P. is at 
this present writing — my Now — in good health, and enjoys 
a fair share of worldly reputation. You are glad to hear it. 
This is natural and friendly. But at4his present reading — 
your Now — he may possibly be in the Bench, or going to 
be hanged, which in reason ought to abate something of 
your transport (i.e., at hearing he was well, etc.), or at least 
considerably to modify it. I am going to the play this 
evening, to have a laugh with Munden. You have no 
theatre, I think you told me, in your land of d d reali- 
ties. You naturally lick your lips, and envy me my felicity. 
Think but a moment, and you will correct the hateful emo- 
tion. Why, it is Sunday morning with you, and 1823. This 
confusion of tenses, this grand solecism of two presents, is in 
a degree common to all postage. But if I sent you word to 
Bath or the Devises, that I was expecting the aforesaid treat 
this evening, though at the moment you received the intelli- 
gence my full feast of fun would be over, yet there would be 
for a day or two after, as you would well know, a smack, a 



120 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

relish left upon my mental palate, which would give rational 
encouragement for you to foster a portion, at least, of the 
disagreeable passion, which it was in part my intention to 
produce. But ten months hence, your envy or your sym- 
pathy would be as useless as a passion spent upon the dead. 
Not only does truth, in these long intervals, un-essence her- 
self, but (what is harder) one cannot venture a crude fiction, 
for the fear that it may ripen into a truth upon the voyage. 
What a wild improbable banter I put upon you, some three 
years since, of Will Weatherall having married a ser- 
vant-maid ! I remember gravely consulting you how we 
were to receive her — for Will's wife was in no case to be 
rejected; and your no less serious replication in the matter; 
how tenderly you advised an abstemious introduction of 
literary topics before the lady, with a caution not to be too 
forward in bringing on the carpet matters more within 
the sphere of her intelligence; your deliberate judgment, or 
rather wise suspension of sentence, how far jacks, and spits, 
and mops, could with propriety be introduced as subjects; 
whether the conscious avoiding of all such matters in discourse 
would not have a worse look than the taking of them casually 
in our way ; in what manner we should carry ourselves to our 
maid Becky, Mrs. Willifi,m Weatherall being by ; whether we 
should show more delicacy, and a truer sense of respect 
for Will's wife, by treating Becky with our customary chid- 
ing before her, or by an unusual deferential civility paid to 
Becky, as to a person of great worth, but thrown by the 
caprice of fate into a humble station. There were difficul- 
ties, I remember, on both sides, which you did me the favor 
to state with the precision of a lawyer, united to the tender- 
ness of a friend. I laughed in my sleeve at your solemn 
pleadings, when lo ! while I was valuing myself upon this 
flam put upon you in New South Wales, the devil in Eng- 
land, jealous possibly of any lie-children not his own, or 
working after my copy, has actually instigated our friend 
(not three days since) to the commission of a matrimony, 
which I had only conjured up for your diversion. William 
Weatherall has married Mrs. Cotterel's maid. But to take 



DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS 121 

it in its truest sense, you will see, my dear F., that news 
from me must become history to you ; which I neither profess 
to write, nor indeed care much for reading. No person, under 
a diviner, can, with any prospect of veracity, conduct a cor- 
respondence at such an arm's length. Two prophets, indeed, 
might thus interchange intelligence with effect; the epoch 
of the writer (Habakkuk) falling in with the true present 
time of the receiver (Daniel) ; but then we are no prophets. 
Then as to sentiment. It fares little better with that. 
This kind of dish, above all, requires to be served up hot, 
or sent off in water-plates, that your friend may have it 
almost as warm as yourself." If it have time to cool, it is 
the most tasteless of all cold meats. I have often smiled 
at a conceit of the late Lord C. It seems that travelling 
somewhere about Geneva, he came to some pretty green 
spot, or nook, where a willow, or something, hung so fan- 
tastically and invitingly over a stream — was it ? — or a 
rock ? — no matter — but the stillness and the repose, after 
a weary journey, 'tis likely, in a languid moment of his 
Lordship's hot, restless life, so took his fancy that he could 
imagine no place so proper, in the event of his death, to 
lay his bones in. This was all very natural and excusable 
as a sentiment, and shows his character in a very pleasing 
light. But when from a passing sentiment it came to be 
an' act ; and when, by a positive testamentary disposal, his 
remains were actually carried all that way from England; 
who was there, some desperate sentimentalists excepted, 
that did not ask the question. Why could not his Lordship 
have found a spot as solitary, a nook as romantic, a tree 
as green and pendent, with a stream as emblematic to his 
purpose, in Surrey, in Dorset, or in Devon? Conceive the 
sentiment boarded up, freighted, entered at the Custom 
House (startling the tide-waiters with the novelty), hoisted 
into a ship. Conceive it pawed about 'and handled between 
the rude jests of tarpaulin ruffians — a thing of its delicate 
texture — the salt bilge wetting it till it became as vapid as 
a damaged lustring. Suppose it in material danger (mariners 
have some superstition about sentiments) of being tossed 



122 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

over in a fresh gale to some propitiatory shark (spirit of 
Saint Gothard, save us from a quietus so foreign to the 
deviser's purpose !) but it has happily evaded a fishy con- 
summation. Trace it then to its lucky landing — at Lyons 
shall we say? — I have not the map before me — jostled 
upon four men's shoulders — baiting at this town — stopping 
to refresh at t'other village — waiting a passport here, a 
license there; the sanction of the magistracy in this dis- 
trict, the concurrence of the ecclesiastics in that canton; 
till at length it arrives at its destination, tired out and jaded, 
from a brisk sentiment, into a feature of silly pride or tawdry 
senseless affectation. How few spntiments, my dear F., I 
am afraid we can set down, in the sailor's phrase, as quite 
seaworthy. 

Lastly, as to the agreeable levities, which, though con- 
temptible in bulk, are the twinkling corpuscula which should 
irradiate a right friendly epistle — your puns and small 
jests are, I apprehend, extremely circumscribed in their 
sphere of action. They are so far from a capacity of being 
packed up and sent beyond sea, they will scarce endure to 
be transported by hand from this room to the next. Their 
vigor is as the instant of their birth. Their nutriment for 
their brief existence is the intellectual atmosphere of the 
bystanders : or this last is the fine slime of Nilus — the 
melior lutus ^ — whose maternal recipiency is as necessary 
as the sol pater ^ to their equivocal generation. A pun hath 
a hearty kind of present ear-kissing smack with it ; you can 
no more transmit it in its pristine flavor than you can send 
a kiss. — Have you not tried in some instances to palm off 
a yesterday's pun upon a gentleman, and has it answered? 
Not but it was new to his hearing, but it did not seem to 
come new from you. It did not hitch in. It was like pick- 
ing up at a village ale-house a two days' old newspaper. 
You have not seen it before, but you resent the stale thing 

^ Finer clay. From Juvenal, Satire xiv. 34, 

2 The Sun Father, Titan. The allusion in the sentence is to the 
old popular belief that animals were generated by the action of the 
sun on the mud left by the inundations of the Nile. 



DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS 123 

as an affront. This sort of merchandise above all requires 
a quick return. A pun, and its recognitory laugh, must be 
co-instantaneous. The one is the brisk lightning, the other 
the fierce thunder. A moment's interval, and the link is 
snapped. A pun is reflected from a friend's face as from a 
mirror. Who would consult his sweet visnomy, if the polished 
surface were two or three minutes (not to speak of twelve 
months, my dear F.) in giving back its copy? 

I cannot image to myself whereabout you are. When I 
try to fix it, Peter Wilkins's island comes across me. Some- 
times you seem to be in the Hades of Thieves. I see Dioge- 
nes prying among you with his perpetual fruitless lantern. 
What must you be willing by this time to give for the sight 
of an honest man! You must almost have forgotten how 
we look. And tell me what your Sydneyites do? are they 
th . . V . ng all day long ? Merciful heaven ! what property 
can stand against such a depredation ! The kangaroos — '■ 
your Aborigines — do they keep their primitive simplicity 
un-Europe-tainted, with those little short fore-puds, looking 
like a lesson framed by nature to the pickpocket ! Marry, 
for diving into fobs they are rather lamely provided a 'priori; 
but if the hue and cry were once up, they would show as fair 
a pair of hind-shifters as the expertest loco-motor in the 
colony. We hear the most improbable tales at this distance. 
Pray, is it true that the young Spartans among you are born 
with six fingers, which spoils their scanning ? — It must 
look very odd; but use reconciles. For their scansion, it 
is less to be regretted; for if they take it into their heads 
to be poets, it is odds but they turn out, the greater part 
of them, vile plagiarists. Is there much difference to see to 
between the son of a th . . f and the grandson ? or where 
does the taint stop ? Do you bleach in three or in four gen- 
erations? I have many questions to put, but ten Delphic 
voyages can be made in a shorter time than it will take to 
satisfy my scruples. Do you grow your own hemp ? — 
What is your staple trade, — exclusive of the national pro- 
fession, I mean? Your locksmiths, I take it, are some of 
your great capitalists. 



124 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

I am insensibly chatting to you as familiarly as when 
we used to exchange good-morrows out of our old con- 
tiguous windows, in pump-famed Hare Court in the Temple. 
Why did you ever leave that quiet corner ? — Why did I ? — 
with its complement of four poor elms, from whose smoke- 
dyed barks, the theme of jesting ruralists, I picked my first 
ladybirds! My heart is as dry as that spring sometimes 
proves in a thirsty August, when I revert to the space that 
is between us ; a length of passage enough to render obsolete 
the phrases of our English letters before they can reach you. 
But while I talk, I think you hear me, — thoughts dallying 
with vain surmise — 

Aye me ! while thee the seas and sounding shores 
Hold far away.^ . 

Come back, before I am grown into a very old man, so 
as you shall hardly know me. Come, before Bridget walks 
on crutches. Girls whom you left children have become 
sage matrons while you are tarrying there. The blooming 

Miss W r (you remember Sally W r) called upon us 

yesterday, an aged crone. Folks whom you knew die off 
every year. Formerly, I thought that death was wearing 
out, — I stood ramparted about with so many healthy 
friends. The departure of J. W., two springs back, corrected 
my delusion. Since then the old divorcer has been busy. 
If you do not make haste to return, there will be little left 
to greet you, of me, or mine. 



THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS 

I LIKE to meet a sweep — understand me — not a grown 
sweeper — old chimney-sweepers are by no means attrac- 
tive — but one of those tender novices, blooming through 
their first nigritude, the maternal washings not quite effaced 
from the cheek — such as come forth with the dawn, or 

1 Cf. Milton's Lycidas, 153-155. 



THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS 125 

somewhat earlier, with their httle professional notes sound- 
ing like the peep-peep of a young sparrow; or liker to the 
matin lark should I pronounce them, in their aerial ascents 
not seldom anticipating the sunrise ? 

I have a kindly yearning towards these dim specks — 
poor blots — innocent blacknesses — 

I reverence these young Africans of our own growth — 
these almost clergy imps, who sport their cloth without 
assumption; and from their little pulpits (the tops of chim- 
neys), in the nipping air of a December morning, preach a 
lesson of patience to mankind. 

When a child, what a mysterious pleasure it was to wit- 
ness their operation ! to see a chit no bigger than one's- 
self enter, one knew not by what process, into what seemed 
the fauces Averni ^ — to pursue him in imagination, as he 
went sounding on through so many dark stifling caverns, 
horrid shades ! to shudder with the idea that "now, surely, he 
must be lost for ever!" — to revive at hearing his feeble 
shout of discovered daylight — and then (O fulness of 
delight !) running out of doors, to come just in time to see 
the sable phenomenon emerge in safety, the brandished 
weapon of his art victorious like some flag waved over a 
conquered citadel ! I seem to remember having been told, 
that a bad sweep was once left in a stack with his brush, to 
indicate which way the wind blew. It was an awful spec- 
tacle, certainly; not much unlike the old stage direction in 
Macbeth, where the "Apparition of child crowned, with a 
tree in his hand, rises." ^ 

Reader, if thou meetest one of these small gentry in thy 
early rambles, it is good to give him a penny, — it is better 
to give him two-pence. If it be starving weather, and to 
the proper troubles of his hard occupation, a pair of kibed 
heels (no unusual accompaniment) be superadded, the 
demand on thy humanity will surely rise to a tester. 

There is a composition, the ground-work of which I have 
understood to be the sweet wood yclept sassafras. This 

» The jaws of hell, Mneid, vi. 201. 2 Macbeth, iv. 1. 



126 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

wood boiled down to a kind of tea, and tempered with an 
infusion of milk and sugar, hath to some tastes a delicacy 
beyond the China luxury. I know not how thy palate may 
relish it; for myself, with every deference to the judicious 
Mr. Read, who hath time out of mind kept open a shop 
(the only one he avers in London) for the vending of this 
''wholesome and pleasant beverage," on the south side of 
Fleet Street, as thou approachest Bridge Street — the only 
Salopian house — I have never yet adventured to dip my 
own particular lip in a basin of his commended ingredients 
— a cautious premonition to the olfactories constantly 
whispering to me, that my stomach must infallibly, with all 
due courtesy, decline it. Yet I have seen palates, otherwise 
not uninstructed in dietetical elegancies, sup it up with 
avidity. 

I know not by what particular conformation of the organ 
it happens, but I have always found that this composition 
is surprisingly gratifying to the palate of a young chimney- 
sweeper — whether the oily particles (sassafras is slightly 
oleaginous) do attenuate and soften the fuliginous con- 
cretions, which are sometimes found (in dissections) to 
adhere to the roof of the mouth in these unfledged practi- 
tioners; or whether Nature, sensible that she had mingled 
too much of bitter wood in the lot of these raw victims, 
caused to grow out of the earth her sassafras for a sweet 
lenitive — but so it is, that no possible taste or odor to the 
senses of a young chimney-sweeper can convey a delicate 
excitement comparable to this mixture. Being penniless, 
they will yet hang their black heads over the ascending 
steam, to gratify one sense if possible, seemingly no less 
pleased than those domestic animals — cats — when they 
purr over a new-found sprig of valerian. There is something 
more in these sympathies than philosophy can inculcate. 

Now albeit Mr. Read boasteth, not without reason, that 
his is the only Salopian house; yet be it known to thee. 
Reader — if thou art one who keepest what are called good 
hours, thou art haply ignorant of the fact — he hath a race 
of industrious imitators, who from stalls, and under open 



THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS 127 

sky, dispense the same savory mess to humbler customers, 
at that dead time of the dawn, when (as extremes meet) the 
rake, reehng home from his midnight cups, and the hard- 
handed artizan leaving his bed to resume the premature 
labors of the day, jostle, not unfrequently to the manifest 
disconcerting of the former, for the honors of the pavement. 
It is the time when, in summer, between the expired and 
the not yet relumined kitchen-fires, the kennels of our fair 
metropolis give forth their least satisfactory odors. The 
rake, who wisheth to dissipate his o'ernight vapors in more 
grateful coffee, curses the ungenial fume, as he passeth ; but 
the artizan stops to taste, and blesses the fragrant breakfast. 

This is saloop — the precocious herb-woman's darling — 
the delight of the early gardener, who transports his smok- 
ing cabbages by break of day from Hammersmith to Covent 
Garden's famed piazzas — the delight, and oh ! I fear, too 
often the envy, of the unpennied sweep. Hini shouldst thou 
haply encounter, with his dim visage pendent over the grate- 
ful steam, regale him with a sumptuous basin (it will cost 
thee but three halfpennies) and a slice of delicate bread and 
butter (an added halfpenny) — so may thy cuhnary fires, 
eased of the o'ercharged secretions from thy worse-placed 
hospitalities, curl up a lighter volume to the welkin — so 
may the descending soot never taint thy costly well-ingredi- 
enced soups — nor the odious cry, quick-reaching from street 
to street, of the fired chimney, invite the rattling engines 
from ten adjacent parishes, to disturb for a casual scintilla- 
tion thy peace and pocket ! 

I am by nature extremely susceptible of street affronts; 
the jeers and taunts of the populace; the low-bred triumph 
they display over the casual trip, or splashed stocking, of 
a gentleman. Yet can I endure the jocularity of a young 
sweep with something more than forgiveness. — In the last 
winter but one, pacing along Cheapside with my accustomed 
precipitation when I walk westward, a treacherous slide 
brought me upon my back in an instant. I scrambled up 
with pain and shame enough — yet outwardly trying to 
face it down, as if nothing had happened — when the roguish 



128 THE ESSAYS OF ELI A 

grin of one of these young wits encountered me. There he 
stood, pointing me out with his dusky finger to the mob, and 
to a poor woman (I suppose his' mother) in particular, till 
the tears for the exquisiteness of the fun (so he thought it) 
worked themselves out at the corners of his poor red eyes, red 
from many a previous weeping, and soot-inflamed, yet twin- 
kling through all with such a joy, snatched out of desolation, 

that Hogarth but Hogarth has got him already (how 

could he miss him?) in the March to Finchley, grinning at 
the pieman — there he stood, as he stands in the picture, 
irremovable, as if the jest was to last for ever — with such 
a maximum of glee, and minimum of mischief, in his mirth — 
for the grin of a genuine sweep hath absolutely no malice in 
it — that I could have been content, if the honor of a gen- 
tleman might endure it, to have remained his butt and his 
mockery till midnight. 

I am by theory obdurate to the seductiveness of what 
are called a fine set of teeth. Every pair of rosy lips (the 
ladies must pardon me) is a casket presumably holding such 
jewels; but, methinks, they should take leave to "air" 
them as frugally as possible. The fine lady, or fine gentle- 
man, who show me their teeth, show me bones. Yet must 
I confess, that from the mouth of a true sweep a display 
(even to ostentation) of those white and shiny ossifications, 
strikes me as an agreeable anomaly in manners, and an 
allowable piece of foppery. It is, as when 

A sable cloud 
Turns forth her silver lining on the night.^ 

It is like some remnant of gentry not quite extinct ; a badge 
of better days ; a hint of nobility : — and, doubtless, under 
the obscuring darkness and double night of their forlorn 
disguisement, oftentimes lurketh good blood, and gentle 
conditions, derived from lost ancestry, and a lapsed pedi- 
gree. The premature apprenticements of these tender 
victims give but too much encouragement, I fear, to clandes- 
tine and almost infantile abductions; the seeds of civility 

* Comus, i. 223. 



THE PRAISE OP CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS 129 

and true courtesy, so often discernible in these young grafts 
(not otherwise to be accounted for) plainly hint at some 
forced adoptions; many noble Rachels mourning for their 
children, even in our days, countenance the fact; the tales 
of fairy spiriting may shadow a lamentable verity, and the 
recovery of the young Montagu be but a solitary instance of 
good fortune out of many irreparable and hopeless defiliations. 

In one of the state-beds at Arundel Castle, a few years 
gince — under a ducal canopy — (that seat of the Howards 
is an object of curiosity to visitors, chiefly for its beds, 
in which the late duke was especially a connoisseur) — 
encircled with curtains of delicatest crimson, with starry 
coronets inwoven — folded between a pair of sheets whiter 
and softer than the lap where Venus lulled Ascanius — 
was discovered by chance, after all methods of search had 
failed, at noon-day, fast asleep, a lost chimney-sweeper. 
The little creature, having somehow confounded his passage 
among the intricacies of those lordly chimneys, by some un- 
known aperture had alighted upon this magnificent chamber ; 
and, tired with his tedious explorations, was unable to resist 
the delicious invitement to repose, which he there saw ex- 
hibited; so, creeping between the sheets very quietly, laid 
his black head upon the pillow, and slept like a young 
Howard. 

Such is the account given to the visitors at the Castle. — 
But I cannot help seeming to perceive a confirmation of what 
I have just hinted at in this story. A high instinct was at 
work in the case, or I am mistaken. Is it probable that a 
poor child of that description, with whatever weariness he 
might be visited, would have ventured, under such a penalty 
as he would be taught to expect, to uncover the sheets of a 
duke's bed, and deliberately to lay himself down between 
them, when the rug, or the carpet, presented an obvious 
couch, still far above his pretensions — is this probable, I 
would ask, if the great power of nature, which I contend for, 
had not been manifested within him, prompting to the ad- 
venture? Doubtless this young nobleman (for such my 
mind misgives me that he must be) was allured by some 



130 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

memory, not amounting to full consciousness, of his condition 
in infancy, when he was used to be lapped by his mother, or 
his nurse, in just such sheets as he there found, into which 
he was now but creeping back as into his proper incunabula,^ 
and resting-place. — By no other theory than by this senti- 
ment of a pre-existent state (as I may call it), can I explain 
a deed so venturous, and, indeed, upon any other system, 
so indecorous, in this tender, but unseasonable, sleeper. 

My pleasant friend Jem White was so impressed with 
a belief of metamorphoses like this frequently taking place, 
that in some sort to reverse the wrongs of fortune in these 
poor changelings, he instituted an annual feast of chimney- 
sweepers, at which it was his pleasure to officiate as host 
and waiter. It was a solemn supper held in Smithfield, upon 
the yearly return of the fair of St. Bartholomew. Cards 
were issued a week before to the master-sweeps in and about 
the metropolis, confining the invitation to their younger fry. 
Now and then an elderly stripling would get in among us, 
and be good-naturedly winked at ; but our main body were 
infantry. One unfortunate wight, indeed, who, relying upon 
his dusky suit, had intruded himself into our party, but by 
tokens was providentially discovered in time to be no chimney- 
sweeper (all is not soot which looks so), was quoited out of 
the presence with universal indignation, as not having on 
the wedding garment; but in general the greatest harmony 
prevailed. The place chosen was a convenient spot among 
the pens, at the north side of the fair, not so far distant as 
to be impervious to the agreeable hubbub of that vanity, 
but remote enough not to be obvious to the interruption of 
every gaping spectator in it. The guests assembled about 
seven. In those little temporary parlors three tables were 
spread with napery, not so fine as substantial, and at every 
board a comely hostess presided with her pan of hissing 
sausages. The nostrils of the young rogues dilated at the 
savor. James White, as head waiter, had charge of the 
first table; and myself, with our trusty companion Bigod, 

^ Literally, a birthplace ; here used in the sense of swaddling clothes. 



THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS 131 

ordinarily ministered to the other two. There was clamber- 
ing and jostUng, you may be sure, who should get at the first 
table, for Rochester in his maddest days could not have 
done the humors of the scene with more spirit than my friend. 
After some general expression of thanks for the honor the 
company had done him, his inaugural ceremony was to clasp 
the greasy waist of old dame Ursula (the fattest of the three), 
that stood frying and fretting, half-blessing, half-cursing 
*Hhe gentleman," and imprint upon her chaste lips a tender 
salute, whereat the universal host would set up a shout that 
tore the concave, while hundreds of grinning teeth startled 
the night with their brightness. it was a pleasure to see 
the sable younkers lick in the unctuous meat, with his more 
unctuous sayings — how he would fit the tit-bits to the 
puny mouths, reserving the lengthier links for the seniors — 
how he would intercept a morsel even in the jaws of some 
young desperado, declaring it "must to the pan again to 
be browned, for it was not fit for a gentleman's eating " — 
how he would recommend this slice of white bread, or that 
piece of kissing-crust, to a tender juvenile, advising them all 
to have a care of cracking their teeth, which were their best 
patrimony, — how genteelly he would deal about the small 
ale, as if it were wine, naming the brewer, and protesting, if 
it were not good, he should lose their custom ; with a special 
recommendation to wipe the lip before drinking. Then we 
had our toasts — "the King," — "the Cloth," — which, 
whether they understood or not, was equally diverting and 
flattering ; and for a crowning sentiment, which never failed, 
"May the Brush supersede the Laurel!" All these, and 
fifty other fancies, which were rather felt than comprehended 
by his guests, would he utter, standing upon tables, and 
prefacing every sentiment with a "Gentlemen, give me leave 
to propose so and so," which was a prodigious comfort to 
those young orphans ; every now and then stuffing into his 
mouth (for it did not do to be squeamish on these occasions) 
indiscriminate pieces of those reeking sausages, which pleased 
them mightily, and was the savoriest part, you may believe, 
of the entertainment. 



132 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

Golden lads and lasses must, 

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust — * 

James White is extinct, and with him these suppers 
have long ceased. He carried away with him half the fun 
of the world when he died — of my world at least. His old 
clients look for him among the pens; and, missing him, re- 
proach the altered feast of St. Bartholomew, and the glory 
of Smithfield departed for ever. 



A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG 

Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend 
M. was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the 
first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing or 
biting it from the living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia 
to this day. This period is not obscurely hinted at by their 
great Confucius in the second chapter of his Mundane Muta- 
tions, where he designates a kind of golden age by the term 
Cho-fang, literally the Cooks' Holiday. The manuscript goes 
on to say, that the art of roasting, or rather broiling (which 
I take to be the elder brother) was accidentally discovered in 
the manner following. The swine-herd, Ho-ti, having gone 
out into the woods one morning, as his manner was, to collect 
mast for his hogs, left his cottage in the care of his eldest son 
Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who being fond of playing with 
fire, as younkers of his age commonly are, let some sparks 
escape into a bundle of straw, which kindling quickly, spread 
the conflagration over every part of their poor mansion, till 
it was reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry 
antediluvian make-shift of a building, you may think it), 
what was of much more importance, a fine litter of new-far- 
rowed pigs, no less than nine in number, perished. China 
pigs have been esteemed a luxury all over the East, from the 
remotest periods that we read of. Bo-bo was in the utmost 
consternation, as you may think, not so much for the sake 

1 Cymbeline, iv. 2. 262-263. 



A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG 133 

of the tenement, which his father and he could easily build 
up again with a few dry branches, and the labor of an hour 
or two, at any time, as for the loss of the pigs. While he was 
thinking what he should say to his father, and wringing his 
hands over the smoking remnants of one of those untimely 
sufferers, an odor assailed his nostrils, unlike any scent 
which he had before experienced. What could it proceed 
from ? — not from the burnt cottage — he had smelt that 
smell before — indeed, this was by no means the first accident 
of the kind which had occurred through the negligence of 
this unlucky young firebrand. Much less did it resemble 
that of any known herb, weed, or flower. A premonitory 
moistening at the same time overflowed his nether lip. 
He knew not what to think. He next stooped down to 
feel the pig, if there were any signs of life in it. He burnt 
his fingers, and to cool them he applied them in his booby 
fashion to his mouth. Some of the crumbs of the scorched 
skin had come away with his fingers, and for the first time 
in his life (in the world's life indeed, for before him no man 
had known it) he tasted — crackling ! Again he felt and 
fumbled at the pig. It did not burn him so much now, 
still he licked his fingers from a sort of habit. The truth at 
length broke into his slow understanding, that it was the pig 
that smelt so, and the pig that tasted so delicious ; and sur- 
rendering himself up to the new-born pleasure, he fell to tear- 
ing up whole handfuls of the scorched skin with the flesh 
next it, and was cramming it down his throat in his beastly 
fashion, when his sire entered amid the smoking rafters, 
armed with retributory cudgel, and finding how affairs stood, 
began to rain blows upon the young rogue's shoulders, as 
thick as hail-stones, which Bo-bo heeded not any more 
than if they had been flies. The tickling pleasure, which he 
experienced in his lower regions, had rendered him quite 
callous to any inconveniences he might feel in those remote 
quarters. His father might lay on, but he could not beat 
him from his pig, till he had fairly made an end of it, when, 
becoming a little more sensible of his situation, something 
like the following dialogue ensued. 



134 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

"You graceless whelp, what have you got there devour- 
ing? Is it not enough that you have burnt me down three 
houses with your dog's tricks, and be hanged to you ! but 
you must be eating fire, and I know not what — what have 
you got there, I say?" 

"0 father, the pig, the pig! do come and taste how nice 
the burnt pig eats." 

The ears of Ho-ti tingled with horror. He cursed his son, 
and he cursed himself that ever he should beget a son that 
should eat burnt pig. 

Bo-bo, whose scent was wonderfully sharpened since 
morning, soon raked out another pig, and fairly rending it 
asunder, thrust the lesser half by main force into the fists of 
Ho-ti, still shouting out, "Eat, eat, eat the burnt pig, father, 
only taste — O Lord!" — with such-like barbarous ejacu- 
lations, cramming all the while as if he would choke. 

Ho-ti trembled every joint while he grasped the abom- 
inable thing, wavering whether he should not put his son 
to death for an unnatural young monster, when the crack- 
ling scorching his fingers, as it had done his son's, and apply- 
ing the same remedy to them, he in his turn tasted some of 
its flavor, which, make what sour mouths he would for a 
pretence, proved not altogether displeasing to him. In con- 
clusion (for the manuscript here is a little tedious), both 
father and son fairly sat down to the mess, and never left 
off till they had despatched all that remained of the litter. 

Bo-bo was strictly enjoined not to let the secret escape, 
for the neighbors would certainly have stoned them for 
a couple of abominable wretches, who could think of im- 
proving upon the good meat which God had sent them. 
Nevertheless, strange stories got about. It was observed 
that Ho-ti 's cottage was burnt down now more frequently 
than ever. Nothing but fires from this time forward. Some 
would break out in broad day, others in the night-time. 
As often as the sow farrowed, so sure was the house of Ho-ti 
to be in a blaze; and Ho-ti himself, which was the more 
remarkable, instead of chastising his son, seemed to grow 
more indulgent to him than ever. At length they were 



A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG 135 

watched, the terrible mystery discovered, and father and 
son summoned to take their trial at Pekin, then an incon- 
siderable assize town. Evidence was given, the obnoxious 
food itself produced in court, and verdict about to be pro- 
nounced, when the foreman of the jury begged that some 
of the burnt pig, of which the culprits stood accused, might 
be handed into the box. He handled it, and they all handled 
it; and burning their fingers, as Bo-bo and his father had 
done before them, and nature prompting to each of them 
the same remedy, against the face of all the facts, and the 
clearest charge which judge had ever given, — to the surprise 
of the whole court, townsfolk, strangers, reporters, and all 
present — without leaving the box, or any manner of con- 
sultation whatever, they brought in a simultaneous verdict 
of Not Guilty. 

The judge, who was a shrewd fellow, winked at the mani- 
fest iniquity of the decision; and when the court was dis- 
missed, went privily and bought up all the pigs that could 
be had for love or money. In a few days his lordship's 
town-house was observed to be on fire. The thing took 
wing, and now there was nothing to be seen but fires in every 
direction. Fuel and pigs grew enormously dear all over the 
district. The insurance offices one and all shut up shop. 
People built slighter and slighter every day, until it was 
feared that the very science of architecture would in no long 
time be lost to the world. Thus this custom of firing houses 
continued, till in process of time, says my manuscript, a sage 
arose, like our Locke, who made a discovery that the flesh of 
swine, or indeed of any other animal, might be cooked (burnt, 
as they called it) without the necessity of consuming a whole 
house to dress it. Then first began the rude form of a grid- 
iron. Roasting by the string or spit came in a century or 
two later, I forget in whose dynasty. By such slow degrees, 
concludes the manuscript, do the most useful, and seemingly 
the most obvious, arts make their way among mankind 

Without placing too implicit faith in the account above 
given, it must be agreed that if a worthy pretext for so 
dangerous an experiment as setting houses on fire (especially 



136 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

in these days) could be assigned in favor of any culinary 

object, that pretext and excuse might be found in roast pig. 

Of all the delicacies in the whole mundus edibilis,^ I will 

maintain it to be the most delicate — princeps obsoniorum} 

1 speak not of your grown porkers — things between pig 
and pork — those hobbledehoys — but a young and tender 
suckling — under a moon old — guiltless as yet of the sty — 
with no original speck of the amor immunditioe,^ the heredi- 
tary failing of the first parent, yet manifest — his voice 
as yet not broken, but something between a childish treble 
and a grumble — the mild forerunner or prceludium ^ of a 
grunt. 

He must he roasted. I am not ignorant that our ancestors 
ate them seethed, or boiled — but what a sacrifice of the 
exterior tegument ! 

There is no flavor comparable, I will contend, to that 
of the crisp, tawny, well- watched, not over-roasted, crack- 
ling, as it is well called — the very teeth are invited to their 
share of the pleasure at this banquet in overcoming the 
coy, brittle resistance — with the adhesive oleaginous — 
O call it not fat ! but an indefinable sweetness growing up 
to it — the tender blossoming of fat — fat cropped in the 
bud — taken in the shoot — in the first innocence — the 
cream and quintessence of the child-pig's yet pure food — ■ 
the lean, no lean, but a kind of animal manna — or, rather, 
fat and lean (if it must be so) so blended and running into 
each other, that both together make but one ambrosian 
result or common substance. 

Behold him while he is "doing" — it seemeth rather 
a refreshing warmth, than a scorching heat, that he is so 
passive to. How equably he twirleth round the string ! 
Now he is just done. To see the extreme sensibility of 
that tender age ! he hath wept out his pretty eyes — radi- 
ant jellies — shooting stars. — 

^ Mundus edihilis means a world of eatables; princeps obsoniorum, 
the chief of tidbits. 

2 Love of dirt. "An allusion to the original sin in the porcine 
Adam and Eve." Lucas. ^ Prelude. 



A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG 137 

See him in the dish, his second cradle, how meek he heth ! 
— wouldst thou have had this innocent grow up to the gross- 
ness and indocihty which too often accompany maturer 
swinehood? Ten to one he would have proved a glutton, 
a sloven, an obstinate, disagreeable animal — wallowing in 
all manner of filthy conversation — from these sins he is 
happily snatched away — 

Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade, 
Death came with timely care — ^ 

his memory is odoriferous — no clown curseth, while his 
stomach half rejecteth, the rank bacon — no coalheaver 
bolteth him in reeking sausages — he hath a fair sepulchre 
in the grateful stomach of the judicious epicure — and for 
such a tomb might be content to die. 

He is the best of sapors. Pine-apple is great. She 
is indeed almost too transcendent — a delight, if not sinful, 
yet so like to sinning, that really a tender-conscienced 
person would do well to pause — too ravishing for mortal 
taste, she woundeth and excoriateth the lips that approach 
her — like lovers' kisses, she biteth — she is a pleasure 
bordering on pain from the fierceness and insanity of her 
relish — but she stoppeth at the palate — she meddleth not 
with the appetite — and the coarsest hunger might barter 
her consistently for a mutton-chop. 

Pig — let me speak his praise — is no less provocative 
of the appetite than he is satisfactory to the criticalness 
of the censorious palate. The strong man may batten on 
him, and the weakling refuseth not his mild juices. 

Unlike to mankind's mixed characters, a bundle of virtues 
and vices, inexplicably intertwisted, and not to be un- 
ravelled without hazard, he is — good throughout. No 
part of him is better or worse than another. He helpeth, 
as far as his little means extend, all around. He is the 
least envious of banquets. He is all neighbors' fare. 

I am one of those who freely and ungrudgingly impart 
a share of the good things of this life which fall to their 

^ Coleridge's Epitaph on an Infant. 



138 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA 

lot (few as mine are in this kind) to a friend. I protest 
I take as great an interest in my friend's pleasures, his 
relishes, and proper satisfactions, as in mine own. "Pres- 
ents,'' I often say, "endear Absents." Hares, pheasants, 
partridges, snipes, barn-door chickens (those "tame villatic 
fowl"),^ capons, plovers, brawn, barrels of oysters, I dispense 
as freely as I receive them. I love to taste them, as it 
were, upon the tongue of my friend. But a stop must 
be put somewhere. One would not, like Lear, "give every- 
thing." I make my stand upon pig. Methinks it is an in- 
gratitude to the Giver of all good flavors, to extra-domicili- 
ate, or send out of the house, slightingly (under pretext of 
friendship, or I know not what) a blessing so particularly 
adapted, predestined, I may say, to my individual palate. — 
It argues an insensibility. 

I remember a touch of conscience in this kind at school. 
My good old aunt,^ who never parted from me at the end 
of a holiday without stuffing a sweetmeat, or some nice 
thing, into my pocket, had dismissed me one evening with a 
smoking plum-cake, fresh from the oven. In my way to 
school (it was over London Bridge) a grey-headed old beggar 
saluted me (I have no doubt, at this time of day, that he 
was a counterfeit). I had no pence to console him with, 
and in the vanity of self-denial, and the very coxcombry 
of charity, school-boy like, I made him a present of — the 
whole cake ! I walked on a little, buoyed up, as one is on 
such occasions, with a sweet soothing of self-satisfaction; 
but, before I had got to the end of the bridge, my better 
feelings returned, and I burst into tears, thinking how un- 
grateful I had been to my good aunt, to go* and give her 
good gift away to a stranger that I had never seen before, 
and who might be a bad man for aught I knew; and then 
I thought of the pleasure my aunt would be taking in think- 
ing that I — I myself, and not another — would eat her 
nice cake — and what should I say to her the next time 
I saw her — how naughty I was to part with her pretty 

^ Milton's Samson Agonistes, 1695. 2 Aunt Hetty. 



A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG 139 

present ! — and the odor of that spicy cake came back upon 
my recollection, and the pleasure and the curiosity I had 
taken in seeing her make it, and her joy when she sent it to 
the oven, and how disappointed she would feel that I had 
never had a bit of it in my mouth at last — and I blamed my 
impertinent spirit of alms-giving, and out-of-place hypocrisy 
of goodness ; and above all I wished never to see the face 
again of that insidious, good-for-nothing, old grey impostor. 

Our ancestors were nice in their method of sacrificing 
these tender victims. We read of pigs whipt to death 
with something of a shock, as we hear of any other obsolete 
custom. The age of discipline is gone by, or it would be 
curious to inquire (in a philosophical light merely) what 
effect this process might have towards intenerating and 
dulcifying a substance naturally so mild and dulcet as the 
flesh of young pigs. It looks like refining a violet. Yet 
we should be cautious, while we condemn the inhumanity, 
how we censure the wisdom of the practice. It might impart 
a. gusto — 

I remember an hypothesis, argued upon by the young 
students, when I was at St. Omer's, and maintained with 
much learning and pleasantry on both sides, "Whether, 
supposing that the flavor of a pig who obtained his death 
by whipping (per flagellationem extremam ^) superadded 
a pleasure upon the palate of a man more intense than 
any possible suffering we can conceive in the animal, is 
man justified in using that method of putting the animal 
to death ? " I forget the decision. 

His sauce should be considered. Decidedly, a few bread 
crumbs, done up with his liver and brains, and a dash of 
mild sage. But banish, dear Mrs. Cook, I beseech you, 
the whole onion tribe. Barbecue your whole hogs to your 
palate, steep them in shalots, stuff them out with planta- 
tions of the rank and guilty garlic ; you cannot poison them, 
or make them stronger than they are — but consider, he 
is a weakling — a flower. 

^ By whipping to the extreme, i.e. to death. 




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THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

PREFACE TO THE LAST ESSAYS 

BY A FRIEND OF THE LATE ELIA 

This poor gentleman, who for some months past had been 
in a declining way, hath at length paid his final tribute 
to nature. 

To say truth, it is time he were gone. The humor of 
the thing, if ever there was much in it, was pretty well 
exhausted; and a two years' and a half existence has been 
a tolerable duration for a phantom. 

I am now at liberty to confess, that much which I have 
heard objected to my late friend's writings was well founded. 
Crude they are, I grant you — a sort of unlicked, incondite 
things — villainously pranked in an affected array of antique 
modes and phrases. They had not been his, if they had 
been other than such ; and better it is, that a writer should 
be natural in a self -pleasing quaintness, than to affect a 
naturalness (so called) that should be strange to him. Egotis- 
tical they have been pronounced by some who did not 
know that what he tells us, as of himself, was often true only 
(historically) of another; as in a former Essay (to save 
many instances) — where under the first person (his favorite 
figure) he shadows forth the forlorn estate of a country boy 
placed at a London school, far from his friends and connections 
— in direct opposition to his own early history. If it be 
egotism to imply and twine with his own identity the griefs 
and affections of another — making himself many, or reduc- 
ing many unto himself — then is the skilful novelist, who 
all along brings in his hero or heroine, speaking of themselves, 

141 



142 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

the greatest egotist of all; who yet has never, therefore, 
been accused of that narrowness. And how shall the in- 
tenser dramatist escape being faulty, who, doubtless under 
cover of passion uttered by another, oftentimes gives blame- 
less vent to his most inward feelings, and expresses his own 
story modestly ? 

My late friend was in many respects a singular character. 
Those who did not like him, hated him; and some, who 
once liked him, afterwards became his bitterest haters. 
The truth is, he gave himself too little concern what he 
uttered, and in whose presence. He observed neither 
time nor place, and would e'en out with what came upper- 
most. With the severe religionist he would pass for a 
free-thinker; while the other faction set him down for a 
bigot, or persuaded themselves that he belied his senti- 
ments. Few understood him; and I am not certain that 
at all times he quite understood himself. He too much 
affected that dangerous figure — irony. He sowed doubtful 
speeches, and reaped plain, unequivocal hatred. He would 
interrupt the gravest discussion with some light jest; and 
yet, perhaps, not quite irrelevant in ears that could under- 
stand it. Your long and much talkers hated him. The 
informal habit of his mind, joined to an inveterate impedi- 
ment of speech, forbade him to be an orator ; and he seemed 
determined that no one else should play that part when he 
was present. He was 'petit and ordinary in his person and 
appearance. I have seen him sometimes in what is called 
good company, but where he has been a stranger, sit silent, 
and be suspected for an odd fellow ; till some unlucky occa- 
sion provoking it, he would stutter out some senseless pun 
(not altogether senseless, perhaps, if rightly taken), which 
has stamped his character for the evening. It was hit or 
miss with him; but nine times out of ten he contrived 
by this device to send away a whole company his enemies. 
His conceptions rose kindlier than his utterance, and his 
happiest impromptus had the appearance of effort. He 
has been accused of trying to be witty, when in truth he 
was but strugghng to give his poor thoughts articulation. 



PREFACE TO THE LAST ESSAYS 143 

He chose his companions for some individuahty of char- 
acter which they manifested. Hence, not many persons 
of science, and few professed literati,^ were of his councils. 
They were, for the most part, persons of an uncertain for- 
tune; and, as to such people commonly nothing is more 
obnoxious than a gentleman of settled (though moderate) 
income, he passed with most of them for a great miser. 
To my knowledge this was a mistake. His intimados,^ 
to confess a truth, were in the world's eye a ragged regi- 
ment. He found them floating on the surface of society; 
and the color, or something else, in the weed pleased him. 
The burrs stuck to him — but they were good and loving 
burrs for all that. He never greatly cared for the society 
of what are called good people. If any of these were scandal- 
ized (and offences were sure to arise) he could not help it. 
When he has been remonstrated with for not making more con- 
cessions to the feelings of good people, he would retort by 
asking, what one point did these good people ever concede 
to him ? He was temperate in his meals and diversions, but 
always kept a little on this side of abstemiousness. Only in 
the use of the Indian weed he might be thought a little ex- 
cessive. He took it, he would say, as a solvent of speech. 
Marry — as the friendly vapor ascended, how his prattle 
would curl up sometimes with it ! the ligaments which 
tongue-tied him were loosened, and the stammerer pro- 
ceeded a statist ! 

I do not know whether I ought to bemoan or rejoice 
that my old friend is departed. His jests were beginning 
to grow obsolete, and his stories to be found out. He felt 
the approaches of age; and while he pretended to cling 
to life, you saw how slender were the ties left to bind him. 
Discoursing with him latterly on this subject, he expressed 
himself with a pettishness, which I thought unworthy 
of him. In our walks about his suburban retreat (as he 

1 Men of letters. Few men of letters have had more friends among 
the literati than Lamb. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Hazlitt, 
and Barry Cornwall were his intimates. 

2 Intimate friends. 



144 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

called it) at Shacklewell, some children belonging to a school 
of industry had met us, and bowed and curtseyed, as he 
thought, in an especial manner to him. ''They take me 
for a visiting governor," he muttered earnestly. He had 
a horror, which he carried to a foible, of looking like any- 
thing important and parochial. He thought that he ap- 
proached nearer to that stamp daily. He had a general 
aversion from being treated like a grave or respectable 
character, and kept a wary eye upon the advances of age 
that should so entitle him. He herded always, while it 
was possible, with people younger than himself. He did 
not conform to the march of time, but was dragged along 
in the procession. His manners lagged behind his years. 
He was too much of the boy-man. The toga virilis^ never 
sate gracefully on his shoulders. The impressions of infancy 
had burnt into him, and he resented the impertinence of 
manhood. These were weaknesses ; but such as they were, 
they are a key to explicate some of his writings. 



BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE 

I DO not know a pleasure more affecting than to range at 
will over the deserted apartments of some fine old family 
mansion. The traces of extinct grandeur admit of a better 
passion than envy: and contemplations on the great and 
good, whom we fancy in succession to have been its in- 
habitants, weave for us illusions, incompatible with the 
bustle of modern occupancy, and vanities of foolish present 
aristocracy. The same difference of feeling, I think, at- 
tends us between entering an empty and a crowded church. 
In the latter it is chance but some present human frailty 
— an act of inattention on the part of some of the audi- 
tory — or a trait of affectation, or worse, vain-glory, on that 
of the preacher, puts us by our best thoughts, disharmonizing 
the place and the occasion. But wouldst thou know the 
^ The garment of manhood. 



BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE 145 

beauty of holiness ? — go alone on some week-day, borrow- 
ing the keys of good Master Sexton, traverse the cool aisles 
of some country church : think of the piety that has kneeled 
there — the congregations, old and young, that have found 
consolation there — the meek pastor — the docile parishioner. 
With no disturbing emotions, no cross conflicting compari- 
sons, drink in the tranquillity of the place, till thou thy- 
self become as fixed and motionless as the marble effigies 
that kneel and weep around thee. 

Journeying northward lately, I could not resist going 
some few miles out of my road to look upon the remains 
of an old great house with which I had been impressed in 
this way in infancy. I was apprised that the owner of it 
had lately pulled it down; still I had a vague notion that 
it could not all have perished — that so much solidity 
with magnificence could not have been crushed all at once 
into the mere dust and rubbish which I found it. 

The work of ruin had proceeded with a swift hand indeed, 
and the demolition of a few weeks had reduced it to — an 
antiquity. 

I was astonished at the indistinction of everything. Where 
had stood the great gates ? What bounded the court-yard ? 
Whereabout did the out-houses commence? A few bricks 
only lay as representatives of that which was so stately and 
so spacious. 

Death does not shrink up his human victim at this rate. 
The burnt ashes of a man weigh more in their proportion. 

Had I seen these brick-and-mortar knaves at their process 
of destruction, at the plucking of every panel I should have 
felt the varlets at my heart. I should have cried out to them 
to spare a plank at least out of the cheerful storeroom, in 
whose hot window-seat I used to sit and read Cowley, with 
the grass-plot before, and the hum and flappings of that one 
sohtary wasp that ever haunted it about me — it is in mine 
ears now, as oft as summer returns ; or a panel of the yellow 
room. 

Why, every plank and panel of that house for me had 
magic in it. The tapestried bedrooms — tapestry so much 



146 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

better than painting — not adorning merely, but peopling 
the wainscots — at which childhood ever and anon would 
steal a look, shifting its coverlid (replaced as quickly) to 
exercise its tender courage in a momentary eye-encounter 
with those stern bright visages, staring reciprocally — all 
Ovid on the walls, in colors vivider than his description. 
Actseon in mid sprout, with the unappeasable prudery of 
Diana; and the still more provoking and almost culinary 
coolness of Dan Phoebus, eel-fashion, deliberately divesting 
of Marsyas. 

Then, that haunted room — in which old Mrs. Battle died 
— whereinto I have crept, but always in the daytime, with 
a passion of fear ; and a sneaking curiosity, terror-tainted, to 
hold communication with the past. — How shall they build 
it up again f 

It was an old deserted place, yet not so long deserted but 
that traces of the splendor of past inmates were everywhere 
apparent. Its furniture was still standing — even to the 
tarnished gilt leather battledores, and crumbling feathers of 
shuttlecocks in the nursery, which told that children had 
once played there. But I was a lonely child, and had the 
range at will of every apartment, knew every nook and 
corner, wondered and worshipped everywhere. 

The solitude of childhood is not so much the mother of 
thought as it is the feeder of love, and silence, and admira- 
tion. So strange a passion for the place possessed me in 
those years, that, though there lay — I shame to say how 
few roods distant from the mansion — half hid by trees, 
what I judged some romantic lake, such was the spell which 
bound me to the house, and such my carefulness not to pass its 
strict and proper precincts, that the idle waters lay unexplored 
for me ; and not till late in life, curiosity prevailing over elder 
devotion, I found, to my astonishment, a pretty brawling 
brook had been the Lacus Incognitus ^ of my infancy. Varie- 
gated views, extensive prospects — and those at no great 
distance from the house — I was told of such — what were 
they to me, being out of the boundaries of my Eden ? So far 

^ The unknown lake; the lake of fancy. 



BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE 147 

from a wish to roam, I would have drawn, methought, still 
closer the fences of my chosen prison, and have been hemmed 
in by a yet securer cincture of those excluding garden walls. 
I could have exclaimed with that garden-loving poet — 

Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines ; 
Curl me about, ye gadding vines; 
And oh so close your circles lace. 
That I may never leave this place ; 
But, lest your fetters prove too weak, 
Ere I your silken bondage break. 
Do you, O brambles, chain me too, 
And, courteous briars, nail me through.^ 

I was here as in a lonely temple. Snug firesides— the 
low-built roof — parlors ten feet by ten— frugal boards, 
and all the homeliness of home — these were the condition 
of my birth — the wholesome soil which I was planted in. 
Yet, without impeachment to their tenderest lessons, I am 
not sorry to have had glances of something beyond ; and to 
have taken, if but a peep, in childhood, at the contrasting 
accidents of a great fortune. 

To have the feeling of gentility, it is not necessary to 
have been born gentle. The pride of ancestry may be had 
on cheaper terms than to be obliged to an importunate 
race of ancestors; and the coatless antiquary in his un- 
emblazoned cell, revolving the long line of a Mowbray's 
or De Clifford's pedigree, at those sounding names may 
warm himself into as gay a vanity as those who do inherit 
them. The claims of birth are ideal merely, and what 
herald shall go about to strip me of an idea ? . Is it trench- 
ant to their swords? can it be hacked off as a spur can? 
or torn away like a tarnished garter ? 

What, else, were the families of the great to us? what 
pleasure should we take in their tedious genealogies, or 
their capitulatory brass monuments? What to us the 
uninterrupted current of their bloods, if our own did not 
answer within us to a cognate and corresponding elevation ? 
Or wherefore, else, O tattered and diminished 'Scutcheon 
1 Marvell, on Appleton House, to the Lord Fairfax. [Lamb's note.] 



148 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

that hung upon the time-worn walls of thy princely stairs, 
Blakesmoor ! have I in childhood so oft stood poring upon 
thy mystic characters — thy emblematic supporters, with 
their prophetic ''Resurgam'' ^ till, every dreg of peasantry 
purging off, I received into myself Very Gentility? Thou 
wert first in my morning eyes ; and of nights, hast detained 
my steps from bedward, till it was but a step from gazing at 
thee to dreaming on thee. 

This is the only true gentry by adoption; the veritable 
change of blood, and not, as empirics have fabled, by trans- 
fusion. 

Who it was by dying that had earned the splendid trophy, 
I know not, I inquired not ; but its fading rags, and colors 
cobweb-stained, told that its subject was of two centuries 
back. 

And what if my ancestor at that date was some Damoetas 
— feeding flocks, not his own, upon the hills of Lincoln — 
did I in less earnest vindicate to myself the family trappings 
of this once proud ^Egon ? — repaying by a backward triumph 
the insults he might possibly have heaped in his life-time upon 
my poor pastoral progenitor. 

If it were presumption so to speculate, the present owners 
of the mansion had least reason to complain. They had long 
forsaken the old house of their fathers for a newer trifle ; and 
I was left to appropriate to myself what images I could pick 
up, to raise my fancy, or to soothe my vanity. 

I was the true descendant of those old W s, and not 

the present family of that name, who had fled the old waste 
places. 

Mine was that gallery of good old family portraits, which 
as I have gone over, giving them in fancy my own family 
name, one — and then another — would seem to smile, 
reaching forward from the canvas, to recognize the new 
relationship ; while the rest looked grave, as it seemed, at 
the vacancy in their dwelling, and thoughts of fled posterity. 

That Beauty with the cool blue pastoral drapery, and a 

^ "I shall rise again." This was not, as Lamb says, the motto 
of the Pltmier family. 



BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE 149 

lamb — that hung next the great bay window — with the 

bright yellow H shire hair, and eye of watchet hue — 

so like my Alice ! — I am persuaded she was a true Elia — 
Mildred Elia, I take it. 

Mine, too, Blakesmoor, was thy noble Marble Hall, 
with its mosaic pavements, and its Twelve Caesars — stately 
busts in marble — ranged round ; of whose countenances, 
young reader of faces as I was, the frowning beauty of 
Nero, I remember, had most of my wonder; but the mild 
Galba had my love. There they stood in the coldness of 
death, yet freshness of immortality. 

Mine, too, thy lofty Justice Hall, with its one chair of 
authority, high-backed and wickered, once the terror of 
luckless poacher, or self-forgetful maiden — so common since, 
that bats have roosted in it. 

Mine, too, — whose else ? — thy costly fruit-garden, with 
its sun-baked southern wall; the ampler pleasure-garden, 
rising backwards from the house in triple terraces, with 
flower-pots now of palest lead, save that a speck here and 
there, saved from the elements, bespake their pristine state 
to have been gilt and glittering ; the verdant quarters back- 
warder still; and, stretching still beyond, in old formality, 
thy firry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel, and the day- 
long murmuring wood-pigeon, with that antique image in 
the centre, God or Goddess I wist not ; but child of Athens 
or old Rome paid never a sincerer worship to Pan or to 
Sylvanus in their native groves, than I to that fragmental 
mystery. 

Was it for this, that I kissed my childish hands too fervently 
in your idol-worship, walks and windings of Blakesmoor! 
for this, or what sin of mine, has the plough passed over 
your pleasant places ? I sometimes think that as men, when 
they die, do not die all, so of their extinguished habitations 
there may be a hope — a germ to be revivified. 



150 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 



POOR RELATIONS 

A Poor Relation — is the most irrelevant thing in nature, 

— a piece of impertinent correspondency, — an odious ap- 
proximation, — a haunting conscience, — a preposterous 
shadow, lengthening in the noon-tide of our prosperity, — 
an unwelcome remembrancer, — a perpetually recurring 
mortification, — a drain on your purse, — a more intoler- 
able dun upon your pride, — a drawback upon success, — 
a rebuke to your rising, — a stain in your blood, — a blot 
on your 'scutcheon, — a rent in your garment — a death's 
head at your banquet, — Agathocles' pot, — a Mordecai in 
your gate, — a Lazarus at your door, — a lion in your path, 

— a frog in your chamber, — a fly in your ointment, — a 
mote in your eye, — a triumph to your enemy, — an apology 
to your friends, — the one thing not needful, — the hail in 
harvest, — the ounce of sour in a pound of sweet. ^ 

He is known by his knock. Your heart telleth you "That 

is Mr. ." A rap, between familiarity and respect; that 

demands, and at the same time seems to despair of, enter- 
tainment. He entereth smiling and — embarrassed. He 
holdeth out his hand to you to shake, and — draweth it 
back again. He casually looketh in about dinner-time — ■ 
when the table is full. He offereth to go away, seeing you 

^ The piling of epithet on epithet in this paragraph reveals the 
wealth of Lamb's dictionary of quotations and his ease in making 
them touch the subject. Among the more difficult references and 
allusions are the following. (Those under proper names are ex- 
plained in the Index.) 

A death's head at your banquet. Among the Egyptians it was a 
custom, according to the Greek historian Herodotus, to have a 
skeleton carried through the banquet hall, so that the feasters should 
be reminded to "drink and be merry; for such you shall be, when 
you die." 

A lion — a frog — a fly — a mote — the one thing. See 1 Kings 
xiii. 24; Exodus viii. 3, 6; Ecclesiastes x. 1; Matthew vii. ; Luke 
X. 42. 



POOR RELATIONS 151 

have company — but is induced to stay. He filleth a chair, 
and your visitor's two children are accommodated at a side- 
table. He never cometh upon open days, when your wife 

says, with some complacency, " My dear, perhaps Mr. will 

drop in to-day." He remembereth birth-days — and pro- 
fesseth he is fortunate to have stumbled upon one. He 
declareth against fish, the turbot being small — yet suffereth 
himself to be importuned into a shce, against his first resolu- 
tion. He sticketh by the port — yet will be prevailed upon 
to empty the remainder glass of claret, if a stranger press it 
upon him. He is a puzzle to the servants, who are fearful of 
being too obsequious, or not civil enough, to him. The 
guests think 'Hhey have seen him before." Every one 
speculateth upon his condition; and the most part take 
him to be a — tide-waiter. He calleth you by your Chris- 
tian name, to imply that his other is the same with your 
own. He is too familiar by half, yet you wish he had less 
diffidence. With half the familiarity, he might pass for a 
casual dependant; with more boldness, he would be in no 
danger of being taken for what he is. He is too humble 
for a friend; j^et taketh on him more state than befits a 
client. He is a worse guest than a country tenant, inasmuch 
as he bringeth up no rent — yet 'tis odds, from his garb and 
demeanor, that your guests take him for one. He is asked 
to make one at the whist table; refuseth on the score of 
poverty, and — resents being left out. When the company 
break up, he proffereth to go for a coach — and lets the 
servant go. He recollects your grandfather ; and will thrust 
in some mean and quite unimportant anecdote of — the 
family. He knew it when it was not quite so flourishing as 
"he is blest in seeing it now." He reviveth past situations, 
to institute what he calleth — favorable comparisons. 
With a reflecting sort of congratulation, he will inquire the 
price of your furniture : and insults you with a special com- 
mendation of your window-curtains. He is of opinion that 
the urn is the more elegant shape ; but, after all, there was 
something more comfortable about the old tea-kettle — which 
you must remember. He dare say you must find a great 



152 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

convenience in having a carriage of your own, and appealeth 
to your lady if it is not so. Inquireth if you have had your 
arms done on vellum yet ; and did not know, till lately, that 
such-and-such had been the crest of the family. His memory 
is unseasonable ; his compliments perverse ; his talk a trouble ; 
his stay pertinacious ; and when he goeth away, you dismiss 
his chair into a corner as precipitately as possible, and feel 
fairly rid of two nuisances. 

There is a worse evil under the sun, and that is — a female 
Poor Relation. You may do something with the other; 
you may pass him off tolerably well ; but your indigent she- 
relative is hopeless. "He is an old humorist,'^ you may 
say, "and affects to go threadbare. His circumstances are 
better than folks would take them to be. You are fond of 
having a Character at your table, and truly he is one.'' But 
in the indications of female poverty there can be no disguise. 
No woman dresses below herself from caprice. The truth 
must out without shuffling. "She is plainly related to the 

L s; or w^hat does she at their house?" She is, in all 

probability, your wife's cousin. Nine times out of ten, at 
least, this is the case. — Her garb is something between a 
gentlewoman and a beggar, yet the former evidently pre- 
dominates. She is most provokingly humble, and ostenta- 
tiously sensible to her inferiority. He may require to be re- 
pressed sometimes — aliquando sufflaminandus erat ^ — but 
there is no raising her. You send her soup at dinner, and 

she begs to be helped — after the gentlemen. Mr. 

requests the honor of taking wine with her; she hesitates 
between Port and Madeira, and chooses the former — 
because he does. She calls the servant Sir; and insists 
on not troubling him to hold her plate. The housekeeper 
patronizes her. The children's governess takes upon her 
to correct her, when she has mistaken the piano for a harp- 
sichord. 

Richard Amlet, Esq., in the play, is a notable instance of 
the disadvantages to which this chimerical notion of afftnity 
constituting a claim to acquaintance, may subject the spirit 

^ It was necessary sometimes to restrain him. 



POOR RELATIONS 153 

of a gentleman. A little foolish blood is all that is betwixt 
him and a lady with a great estate. His stars are perpetually 
crossed by the malignant maternity of an old woman, who 
persists in caUing him "her son Dick." But she has where- 
withal in the end to recompense his indignities, and float him 
again upon the brilliant surface, under which it had been her 
seeming business and pleasure all along to sink him. All 
men, besides, are not of Dick's temperament. I knew an 
Amlet in real life, who, wanting Dick's buoyancy, sank 

indeed. Poor W was of my own standing at Christ's, 

a fine classic, and a youth of promise. If he had a blemish, 
it was too much pride ; but its quality was inoffensive ; it 
was not of that sort which hardens the heart, and serves to 
keep inferiors at a distance; it only sought to ward off 
derogation from itself. It was the principle of self-respect 
carried as far as it could go, without infringing upon that 
respect, which he would have every one else equally main- 
tain for himself. He would have you to think alike with him 
on this topic. Many a quarrel have I had with him, when 
we were rather older boys, and our tallness ^ made us more 
obnoxious to observation in the blue clothes, because I would 
not thread the alleys and blind ways of the town with him 
to elude notice, when we have been out together on a holiday 

in the streets of this sneering and prying metropolis. W 

went, sore with these notions, to Oxford, where the dignity 
and sweetness of a scholar's hfe, meeting with the alloy of a 
humble introduction, wrought in him a passionate devotion 
to the place, with a profound aversion from the society. 
The servitor's gown (worse than his school array) clung to 
him with Nessian venom. He thought himself ridiculous in 
a garb, under which Latimer must have walked erect, and 
in which Hooker, in his young days, possibly flaunted in a 
vein of no discommendable vanity. In the depth of college 
shades, or in his lonely chamber, the poor student shrunk 
from observation. He found shelter among books, which 
insult not; and studies, that ask no questions of a youth's 
finances. He was lord of his library, and seldom cared for 

^ Lamb was, on the contrary, short of stature. 



154 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

looking out beyond his domains. The heahng influence of 
studious pursuits was upon him, to soothe and to abstract. 
He was almost a healthy man ; when the waywardness of his 
fate broke out against him with a second and worse malignity. 
The father of W had hitherto exercised the humble pro- 
fession of house-painter, at N , near Oxford. A sup- 
posed interest with some of the heads of colleges had now 
induced him to take up his abode in that city, with the hope 
of being employed upon some public works which were 
talked of. From that moment I read in the countenance of 
the young man the determination which at length tore him 
from academical pursuits for ever. To a person unacquainted 
with our universities, the distance between the gownsmen 
and the townsmen, as they are called — the trading part 
of the latter especially — is carried to an excess that would 

appear harsh and incredible. The temperament of W 's 

father was diametrically the reverse of his own. Old W 

was a little, busy, cringing tradesman, who, with his son 
upon his arm, would stand bowing and scraping, cap in hand, 
to anything that wore the semblance of a gown — insensible 
to the winks and opener remonstrances of the young man, to 
whose chamber-fellow, or equal in standing, perhaps, he was 
thus obsequiously and gratuitously ducking. Such a state 

of things could not last. W must change the air of 

Oxford, or be suffocated. He chose the former ; and let the 
sturdy moralist, who strains the point of the filial duties 
as high as they can bear, censure the dereliction; he can- 
not estimate the struggle. I stood with W , the last 

afternoon I ever saw him, under the eaves of his paternal 
dwelling. It was in the fine lane leading from the High 

Street to the back of . . . college, where W kept his 

rooms. He seemed thoughtful and more reconciled. I 
ventured to rally him — finding him in a better mood — 
upon a representation of the Artist Evangelist, which the 
old man, whose affairs were beginning to flourish, had caused 
to be set up in a splendid sort of frame over his really hand- 
some shop, either as a token of prosperity or badge of grati- 
tude to his saint. W looked up at the Luke, and, like 



POOR RELATIONS 155 

Satan, "knew his mounted sign — and fled." ^ A letter on 
his father's table, the next morning, announced that he had 
accepted a commission in a regiment about to embark for 
Portugal, He was among the first who perished before the 
walls of St. Sebastian. 

I do not know how, upon a subject which I began with 
treating half seriously, I should have fallen upon a recital 
so eminently painful; but this theme of poor relationship 
is replete with so much matter for tragic as well as comic 
associations, that it is difficult to keep the account dis- 
tinct without blending. The earliest impressions which I 
received on this matter are certainly not attended with 
anything painful, or very humiliating, in the recalling. 
At my father's table (no very splendid one) was to be found, 
every Saturday, the mysterious figure of an aged gentle- 
man, clothed in neat black, of a sad yet comely appearance. 
His deportment was of the essence of gravity ; his words few 
or none ; and I was not to make a noise in his presence. I 
had little inclination to have done so — for my cue was to 
admire in silence. A particular elbow-chair was appropriated 
to him, which was in no case to be violated. A peculiar sort 
of sweet pudding, which appeared on no other occasion, dis- 
tinguished the days of his coming. I used to think him a 
prodigiously rich man. All I could make out of him was, that 
he and my father had been schoolfellows, a world ago, at 
Lincoln, and that he came from the Mint. The Mint I 
knew to be a place where all the money was coined — and 
I thought he was the owner of all that money. Awful 
ideas of the Tower twined themselves about his presence. 
He seemed above human infirmities and passions. A 
sort of melancholy grandeur invested him. From some 
inexplicable doom I fancied him obliged to go about in 
an eternal suit of mourning ; a captive — a stately being, 
let out of the Tower on Saturdays. Often have I wondered 
at the temerity of my father, who, in spite of an habitual 
general respect which we all in common manifested towards 

^ Adapted from Paradise Lost, iv. 1013-1015. 



156 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

him, would venture now and then to stand up against him 
in some argument touching their youthful days. The houses 
of the ancient city of Lincoln are divided (as most of my 
readers know) between the dwellers on the hill and in the 
valley. This marked distinction formed an obvious division 
between the boys who lived above (however brought together 
in a common school) and the boys whose paternal residence 
was on the plain; a sufficient cause of hostility in the code 
of these young Grotiuses. My father had been a leading 
Mountaineer ; and would still maintain the general superiority, 
in skill and hardihood, of the Above Boys (his own faction) 
over the Below Boys (so were they called), of which party 
his contemporary had been a chieftain. Many and hot were 
the skirmishes on this topic — the only one upon which the 
old gentleman was ever brought out — and bad blood bred ; 
even sometimes almost to the recommencement (so I ex- 
pected) of actual hostilities. But my father, who scorned 
to insist upon advantages, generally contrived to turn the 
conversation upon some adroit by-commendation of the old 
Minster ; in the general preference of which, before all other 
cathedrals in the island, the dweller on the hill, and the plain- 
born, could meet on a conciliating level, and lay down their 
less important differences. Once only I saw the old gentle- 
man really ruffled, and I remember with anguish the thought 
that came over me : " Perhaps he will never come here again." 
He had been pressed to take another plate of the viand, which 
I have already mentioned as the indispensable concomitant 
of his visits. He had refused with a resistance amounting 
to rigor, when my aunt, an old Lincolnian, but who had 
something of this, in common with my cousin Bridget, that 
she would sometimes press civility out of season — uttered 
the following memorable application — " Do take another 
slice, Mr. Billet, for you do not get pudding every day." 
The old gentleman said nothing at the time — but he took 
occasion in the course of the evening, when some argu- 
ment had intervened between them, to utter with an em- 
phasis which chilled the company, and which chills me 
now as I write it — "Woman, you are superannuated!" 



STAGE ILLUSION 157 

John Billet did not survive long, after the digesting of this 
affront ; but he survived long enough to assure me that peace 
was actually restored ! and, if I remember aright, another 
pudding was discreetly substituted in the place of that 
which had occasioned the offence. He died at the Mint 
(anno 1781) where he had long held, what he accounted, a 
comfortable independence; and with five pounds, fourteen 
shillings, and a penny, which were found in his escritoir after 
his decease, left the world, blessing God that he had enough 
to bury him, and that he had never been obliged to any man 
for a sixpence. This was — a Poor Relation. 



STAGE ILLUSION 

A PLAY is said to be well or ill acted, in proportion to 
the scenical illusion produced. Whether such illusion can 
in any case be perfect, is not the question. The nearest 
approach to it, we are told, is when the actor appears wholly 
unconscious of the presence of spectators. In tragedy — 
in all which is to affect the feelings — this undivided atten- 
tion to his stage business seems indispensable. Yet it is, 
in fact, dispensed with every day by our cleverest tragedians ; 
and while these references to an audience, in the shape of rant 
or sentiment, are not too frequent or palpable, a sufficient 
quantity of illusion for the purposes of dramatic interest 
may be said to be produced in spite of them. But, tragedy 
apart, it may be inquired whether, in certain characters in 
comedy, especially those which are a little extravagant, or 
which involve some notion repugnant to the moral sense, it 
is not a proof of the highest skill in the comedian when, with- 
out absolutely appealing to an audience, he keeps up a tacit 
understanding with them; and makes them, unconsciously 
to themselves, a party in the scene. The utmost nicety is 
required in the mode of doing this ; but we speak only of the 
great artists in the profession. 

The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to feel 
in ourselves, or to contemplate in another, is, perhaps, 



158 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

cowardice. To see a coward done to the life upon a stage 
would produce anything but mirth. Yet we most of us 
remember Jack Bannister's cowards. Could anything be 
more agreeable, more, pleasant? We loved the rogues. 
How was this effected but by the exquisite art of the actor 
in a perpetual sub-insinuation to us, the spectators, even in 
the extremity of the shaking fit, that he was not half such 
a coward as we took him for? We saw all the common 
symptoms of the malady upon him; the quivering lip, the 
cowering knees, the teeth chattering; and could have sworn 
''that man was frightened." ^ But we forgot all the while — 
or kept it almost a secret to ourselves — that he never once 
lost his self-possession ; that he let out, by a thousand droll 
looks and gestures — meant at us, and not at all supposed 
to be visible to his fellows in the scene, that his confidence 
in his own resources had never once deserted him. Was 
this a genuine picture of a coward ? or not rather a likeness, 
which the clever artist contrived to palm upon us instead of 
an original; while we secretly connived at the delusion for 
the purpose of greater pleasure than a more genuine coun- 
terfeiting of the imbecility, helplessness, and utter self- 
desertion, which we know to be concomitants of cowardice 
in real life, could have given us? 

Why are misers so hateful in the world, and so endur- 
able on the stage, but because the skilful actor, by a sort 
of sub-reference, rather than direct appeal to us, disarms 
the character of a great deal of its odiousness, by seeming 
to engage our compassion for the insecure tenure by which 
he holds his money-bags and parchments? By this subtle 
vent half of the hatefulness of the character — the self- 
closeness with which in real life it coils itself up from the 
sympathies of men — evaporates. The miser becomes sym- 
pathetic; i.e., is no genuine miser. Here again a diverting 
likeness is substituted for a very disagreeable reality. 

^ Fielding's Tom Jones, xvi. Chapter 5. Partridge there thus 
criticises the acting of David Garrick in Hamlet: "If that Httle man 
there upon the stage is not frightened, I never saw any man frightened 
in my life." 



STAGE ILLUSION 159 

Spleen, irritability — the pitiable infirmities of old men, 
which produce only pain to behold in the realities, coun- 
terfeited upon a stage, divert not altogether for the comic 
appendages to them, but in part from an inner conviction 
that they are being acted before us; that a likeness only 
is going on, and not the thing itself. They please by being 
done under the life, or beside it; not to the life. When 
Gattie acts an old man, is he angry indeed ? or only a pleasant 
counterfeit, just enough of a Hkeness to recognize, without 
pressing upon us the uneasy sense of a reality ? 

Comedians, paradoxical as it may seem, may be too 
natural. It was the case with a late actor. Nothing could 
be more earnest or true than the manner of Mr. Emery ; this 
told excellently in his Tyke, and characters of a tragic cast. 
But when he carried the same rigid exclusiveness of atten- 
tion to the stage business, and wilful blindness and oblivion 
of everything before the curtain into his comedy, it produced 
a harsh and dissonant effect. He was out of keeping with 
the rest of the Personce Dramatis. There was as little link 
between him and them, as betwixt himself and the audience. 
He was a third estate — dry, repulsive, and unsocial to all. 
Individually considered, his execution was masterly. But 
comedy is not this unbending thing; for this reason, that 
the same degree of credibility is not required of it as to seri- 
ous scenes. The* degrees of credibility demanded to the two 
things may be illustrated by the different sort of truth which 
we expect when a man tells us a mournful or a merry story. 
If we suspect the former of falsehood in any one tittle, we 
reject it altogether. Our tears refuse to flow at a suspected 
imposition. But the teller of a mirthful tale has latitude 
allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth. 
'Tis the same with dramatic illusion. We confess we love 
in comedy to see an audience naturalized behind the scenes 
— taken into the interest of the drama, welcomed as bystand- 
ers, however. There is something ungracious in a comic 
actor holding himself aloof from all participation or concern 
with those who are come to be diverted by him. Macbeth ^ 

1 Macbeth^ ii. 1, 



160 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

must see the dagger, and no ear but his own be told of it; 
but an old fool in farce may think he sees something, and by 
conscious words and looks express it, as plainly as he can 
speak, to pit, box, and gallery. When an impertinent in 
tragedy, an Osric, for instance, breaks in upon the serious 
passions of the scene, we approve of the contempt with 
which he is treated. But when the pleasant impertinent 
of comedy, in a piece purely meant to give delight and 
raise mirth out of whimsical perplexities, worries the studious 
man with taking up his leisure or making his house his 
home, the same sort of contempt expressed (however natural) 
would destroy the balance of delight in the spectators. To 
make the intrusion comic, the actor who plays the annoyed 
man must a little desert nature ; he must, in short, be think- 
ing of the audience and express only so much dissatisfaction 
and peevishness as is consistent with the pleasure of comedy. 
In other words, his perplexity must seem half put on. If he 
repel the intruder with the sober set face of a man in earnest, 
and more especially if he deliver his expostulations in a tone 
which in the world must necessarily provoke a duel, his 
real-life manner will destroy the whimsical and purely dra- 
matic existence of the other character (which to render it 
comic demands an antagonist comicality on the part of the 
character opposed to it), and convert what was meant for 
mirth, rather than belief, into a downright piece of im- 
pertinence indeed, which would raise no diversion in us, but 
rather stir pain, to see inflicted in earnest upon any worthy 
person. A very judicious actor (in most of his parts) seems 
to have fallen into an error of this sort in his playing with 
Mr. Wrench in the farce of Free and Easy. 

Many instances would be tedious; these may suffice to 
show that comic acting at least does not always demand 
from the performer that strict abstraction from all reference 
to an audience which is exacted of it ; but that in some cases 
a sort of compromise may take place, and all the purposes 
of dramatic delight be attained by a judicious understanding, 
not too openly announced, between the ladies and gentle- 
men — on both sides of the curtain. 



DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING 161 



DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND 
READING 

To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self with 
the forced product of another man's brain. Now I think a 
man of quahty and breeding may be much amused with the 
natural ^sprouts of his own. — Lord Foppington, in " The 

An ingenious acquaintance of my own was so much struck 
with this bright sally of his Lordship, that he has left off 
reading altogether, to the great improvement of his origi- 
nality. At the hazard of losing some credit on this head, I 
must confess that I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my 
time to other people's thoughts. I dream away my life in 
others' speculations. I love to lose myself in other men's 
minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit 
and think. Books think for me. 

I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel 
for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can read anything 
which I call a book. There are things in that shape which 
I cannot allow for such. 

In this catalogue of books which are no books — biblia 
a-biblia^ — l reckon Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket 
Books, Draught Boards bound and lettered on the back, 
Scientific Treatises, Almanacs, Statutes at Large : the works 
of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and, 
generally, all those volumes which ''no gentleman's library 
should be without:" the Histories of Flavins Josephus (that 
learned Jew), and Paley's Moral Philosophy. With these 
exceptions, I can read almost anything. I bless my stars 
for a taste so catholic, so unexcluding. 

I confess that it moves my spleen to see these things 
in books' clothing perched upon shelves, like false saints, 
usurpers of true shrines, intruders into the sanctuary, thrust- 
^ Greek hihlion, a bo©k ; a, not. 



162 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

ing out the legitimate occupants. To reach down a well- 
bound semblance of a volume, and hope it some kind-hearted 
play-book, then, opening what "seem its leaves," to come 
bolt upon a withering Population Essay. To expect a Steele 
or a Farquhar, and find — Adam Smith. To view a well- 
arranged assortment of block-headed Encyclopaedias (Angli- 
canas or Metropolitanas) set out in an array of russia, or 
morocco, when a tithe of that good leather would comfortably 
re-clothe my shivering folios, would renovate Paracelsus him- 
self, and enable old Raymund LuUy to look like himself again 
in the world. I never see these impostors, but I long to strip 
them, to warm my ragged veterans in their spoils. 

To be strong-backed and neat-bound is the desideratum 
of a volume. Magnificence comes after. This, when it 
can be afforded, is not to be lavished upon all kinds of books, 
indiscriminately. I would not dress a set of magazines, -for 
instance, in full suit. The dishabille, or half-binding (with 
russia backs ever) is our costume. A Shakespeare or a Milton 
(unless the first editions), it were mere foppery to trick out 
in gay apparel. The possession of them confers no distinc- 
tion. The exterior of them (the things themselves being so 
common), strange to say, raises no sweet emotions, no tickling 
sense of property in the owner. Thomson's Seasons, again, 
looks best (I maintain it) a little torn and dog's-eared. How 
beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves, 
and worn-out appearance, nay, the very odor (beyond 
russia) , if we would not forget kind feelings in fastidiousness, 
of an old "Circulating Library" Tom Jones, or Vicar of 
Wakefield ! How they speak of the thousand thumbs that 
have turned over their pages with delight \ — of the lone 
sempstress, whom they may have cheered (milliner, or harder- 
working mantua-maker) after her long day's needle-toil, 
running far into midnight, when she has snatched an hour, 
ill spared from sleep, to steep her cares, as in some Lethean 
cup, in spelling out their enchanting contents ! Who would 
have them a whit less soiled? What better condition could 
we desire to see them in? 

In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands 



DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING 163 

from binding. Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and all that class 
of perpetually self-reproductive volumes — Great Nature's 
Stereotypes — we see them individually perish with less 
regret, because we know the copies of them to be "eterne." ^ 
But where a book is at once both good and rare — where the 
individual is almost the species, and when that perishes, 

We know not where is that Promethean torch 
That can its light relumine, — ^ 

such a book, for instance, as the Life of the Duke of New- 
castle, by his Duchess — no casket is rich enough, no casing 
sufficiently durable, to honor and keep safe such a jewel. 

Not only rare volumes of this description, which seem hope- 
less ever to be reprinted, but old editions of writers, such as 
Sir Philip Sydney, Bishop Taylor, Milton in his prose works, 
Fuller — of whom we have reprints, yet the books themselves, 
though they go about, and are talked of here and there, we 
know have not endenizened themselves (nor possibly ever 
will) in the national heart, so as to, become stock books — 
it is good to possess these in durable and costly covers. I 
do not care for a First Folio of Shakespeare. [You cannot 
make a pet book of an author whom everybody reads.] 
I rather prefer the common editions of Eowe and Tonson, 
without notes, and with plates, which, being so execrably 
bad, serve as maps or modest remembrancers, to the text; 
and, without pretending to any supposable emulation with it, 
are so much better than the Shakespeare gallery engravings, 
which did. I have a community of feeling with my country- 
men about his Plays, and I like those editions of him best 
which have been oftenest tumbled about and handled. — 
On the contrary, I cannot read Beaumont and Fletcher but in 
Folio. The Octavo editions are painful to look at, I have 
no sympathy with them. If they were as much read as the 
current editions of the other poet, I should prefer them in that 
shape to the older one. I do not know a more heartless sight 
than the reprint of the Anatomy of Melancholy. What need 

1 Macbeth, ill. 2, 38. » Othello, v. 2. 12-13. 



164 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

was there of unearthing the bones of that fantastic old great 
man, to expose them in a winding-sheet of the newest fashion 
to modern censure? what hapless stationer could dream of 
Burton ever becoming popular ? — The wretched Malone 
could not do worse, when he bribed the sexton of Stratford 
church to let him whitewash the painted effigy of old Shakes- 
])eare, which stood there, in rude but lively fashion depicted, 
to the very color of the cheek, the eye, the eyebrow, hair, the 
very dress he used to wear — the only authentic testimony 
we had, however imperfect, of these curious parts and parcels 
of him. They covered him over with a coat of white paint. 

By , if I had been a justice of peace for Warwickshire, I 

would have clapped both commentator and sexton fast in 
the stocks, for a pair of meddling sacrilegious varlets. 

I think I see them at their work — these sapient trouble- 
tombs. 

Shall I be thought fantastical if I confess that the names 
of some of our poets sound sweeter, and have a finer relish 
to the ear — to mine, at least — than that of Milton or of 
Shakspeare ? It may be that the latter are more staled and 
rung upon in common discourse. The sweetest names, and 
which carry a perfume in the mention, are, Kit Marlowe, 
Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden, and Cowley. 

Much depends upon when and where you read a book. 
In the five or six impatient minutes, before the dinner is quite 
ready, who would think of taking up the Fairy Queen for a 
stop-gap or a volume of Bishop Andre wes' sermons ? 

Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be 
played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, 
to which, who hstens, had need bring docile thoughts, and 
purged ears. 

Winter evenings — the world shut out — with less of cere- 
mony the gentle Shakespeare enters. At such a season the 
Tempest, or his own Winter's Tale — 

These two poets you cannot avoid reading aloud — to 
yourself, or (as it chances) to some single person listening. 
More than one — and it degenerates into an audience. 

Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents, are for 



DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING 165 

the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. 
I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels 
without extreme irksomeness. 

A newspaper, read out, is intolerable. In some of the 
Bank oJSices it is the custom (to save so much individual time) 
for one of the clerks — who is the best scholar — to com- 
mence upon the Times or the Chronicle and recite its entire 
contents aloud, pro bono 'publico} With every advantage of 
lungs and elocution, the effect is singularly vapid. In barbers' 
shops and public-houses a fellow will get up and spell out a 
paragraph, which he communicates as some discovery. 
Another follows with his selection. So the entire journal 
transpires at length by piecemeal. Seldom-readers are slow 
readers, and, without this expedient, no one in the company 
would probably ever travel through the contents of a whole 
paper. 

Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays 
one down without a feeling of disappointment. 

What an eternal time that gentleman in black, at Nando 's, 
keeps the paper ! I am sick of hearing the waiter bawling out 
incessantly, "The Chronicle is in hand. Sir." 

Coming into an inn at night — having ordered your supper 
— what can be more delightful than to find lying in the 
window-seat, left there time out of mind by the carelessness 
of some former guest — two or three numbers of the old 
Town and Country Magazine, with its amusing tete-a-tete ^ 

pictures — "The Royal Lover and Lady G ;" "The 

Melting Platonic and the old Beau," — and such-like anti- 
quated scandal ? Would you exchange it — at that time, 
and in that place — for a better book ? 

Poor Tobin, who latterly fell blind, did not regret it so much 
for the weightier kinds of reading — the Paradise Lost, or 
Comus, he could have read to him — but he missed the 
pleasure of skimming over with his own eye a magazine, or a 
light pamphlet. 

^ For the public good. 

2 French. Literally, head to head. Here used in the sense of 
pictures of confidential interviews. 



166 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

I should not care to be caught in the serious avenues of 
some cathedral alone, and reading Candide. 

I do not remember a more whimsical surprise than having 
been once detected — by a familiar damsel — reclined at 
my ease upon the grass, on Primrose Hill (her Cythera) read- 
ing — Pamela. There was nothing in the book to make a 
man seriously ashamed at the exposure; but as she seated 
herself down by me, and seemed determined to read in 
company, I could have wished it had been — any other book. 
We read on very sociably for a few pages ; and, not finding 
the author much to her taste, she got up, and — went away. 
Gentle casuist, I leave it to thee to conjecture, whether the 
blush (for there was one between us) was the property of. the 
nymph or the swain in this dilemma. From me you shall 
never get the secret. 

I am not much a friend to out-of-doors reading. I cannot 
settle my spirits to it. I knew a Unitarian minister, who 
was generally to be seen upon Snow Hill (as yet Skinner's 
Street was not), between the hours of ten and eleven in the 
morning, studying a volume of Lardner. I own this to have 
been a strain of abstraction beyond my reach. I used to 
admire how he sidled along, keeping clear of secular contacts. 
An illiterate encounter with a porter's knot, or a bread basket, 
would have quickly put to flight all the theology I am master 
of, and have left me worse than indifferent to the five points. 

There is a class of street readers, whom I can never con- 
template without affection — the poor gentry, who, not hav- 
ing wherewithal to buy or hire a book, filch a little learning 
at the open stalls — the owner, with his hard eye, casting 
envious looks at them all the while, and thinking when they 
will have done. Venturing tenderly, page after page, 
expecting every moment when he shall interpose his interdict, 
and yet unable to deny themselves the gratification, they 

"snatch a fearful joy." ^ Martin B , in this way, by 

daily fragments, got through two volume^ of Clarissa, when 
the stall-keeper damped his laudable ambition, by asking him 
(it was in his younger days) whether he meant to purchase 

' Gray's Ode, On a Distant Prospect of Eton College. 



THE OLD MARGATE HOY 167 

the work. M. declares, that under no circumstance in his 
life did he ever peruse a book with half the satisfaction which 
he took in those uneasy snatches. A quaint poetess ^ of 
our day has moralized upon this subject in two very touching 
but homely stanzas : 

I saw a boy with eager eye 

Open a book upon a stall, 

And read, as he'd devour it all ; 

Which, when the stall-man did espy, 

Soon to the boy I heard him call, 

" You Sir, you never buy a book, 

Therefore in one you shall not look," 

The boy pass'd slowly on, and with a sigh 

He wish'd he never had been taught to read, 

Then of the old churl's books he should have had no need. 

Of sufferings the poor have many, 

Which never can the rich annoy. 

I soon perceived another boy — 

Who look'd as if he'd not had any 

Food, for that day at least — enjoy 

The sight of cold meat in a tavern larder. 

This boy's case, then thought I, is surely harder, 

Thus hungry, longing, thus without a penny, 

Beholding choice of dainty-dressed meat : 

No wonder if he wish he ne'er had learn'd to eat. 



THE OLD MARGATE HOY 

I AM fond of passing my vacations (I believe I have said 
so before ^) at one or other of the Universities. Next to these 
my choice would fix me at some woody spot, such as the 
neighborhood of Henley affords in abundance, on the banks 
of my beloved Thames. But somehow or other my cousin 
contrives to wheedle me, once in three or four seasons, to a 
watering-place. Old attachments cling to her in spite of 
experience. We have been dull at Worthing one summer, 

1 Mary Lamb. The stanzas quoted make the entire poem entitled 
"The Two Boys." 2 i^ "Oxford in the Vacation." 



168 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

duller at Brighton another, dullest at Eastbourn a third, and 
are at this moment doing dreary penance at — Hastings ! — 
and all because we were happy many years ago for a brief 
week at Margate. That was our first sea-side experiment, 
and many circumstances combined to make it the most 
agreeable holiday of my life. We had neither of us seen the 
sea, and we had never been from home so long together in 
company. 

Can I forget thee, thou old Margate Hoy, with thy weather- 
beaten, sun-burnt captain, and his rough accommodations — 
ill exchanged for the foppery and fresh-water niceness of the 
modern steam-packet ? To the winds and waves thou com- 
mittedst thy goodly freightage, and didst ask no aid of magic 
fumes, and spells, and boiling caldrons. With the gales of 
heaven thou wentest swimmingly; or, when it was their 
pleasure, stoodest still with sailor-like patience. Thy course 
was natural, not forced, as in a hotbed; nor didst thou go 
poisoning the breath of ocean with sulphureous smoke — a 
great sea chimera, chimneying and furnacing the deep ; or 
liker to that fire-god ^ parching up Scamander. 

Can I forget thy honest, yet slender crew, with their coy 
reluctant responses (yet to the suppression of anything like 
contempt) to the raw questions, which we of the great city 
would be ever and anon putting to them, as to the uses of this 
or that strange naval implement ? 'Specially can I forget thee, 
thou happy medium, thou shade of refuge between us and 
them, conciliating interpreter of their skill to our simplicity, 
comfortable ambassador between sea and land ! — whose 
sailor-trousers did not more convincingly assure thee to be an 
adopted denizen of the former, than thy white cap, and whiter 
apron over them, with thy neat-fingered practice in thy 
culinary vocation, bespoke thee to have been of inland nurture 
heretofore — a master cook of Eastcheap ? How busily 
didst thou ply thy multifarious occupation, cook, mariner, 
attendant, chamberlain; here, there, like another Ariel, 
flaming at once about all parts of the deck, yet with kindlier 
ministrations — not to assist the tempest, but, as if touched 

^ See Scamander in the Index. 



THE OLD MARGATE HOY 169 

with a kindred sense of our infirmities, to soothe the qualms 
which that untried motion might haply raise in our crude 
land-fancies. And when the o'erwashing billows drove us 
below deck (for it was far gone in October, and we had stiff 
and blowing weather), how did thy officious ministerings, 
still catering for our comfort, with cards, and cordials, and 
thy more cordial conversation, alleviate the closeness and the 
confinement of thy else (truth to say) not very savory, nor 
very inviting, little cabin ! 

With these additaments to boot, we had on board a fellow- 
passenger, whose discourse in verity might have beguiled 
a longer voyage than we meditated, and have made mirth 
and wonder abound as far as the Azores. He was a dark, 
Spanish-complexioned young man, remarkably handsome, 
with an officer-like assurance, and an insuppressible volubility 
of assertion. He was, in fact, the greatest liar I had met with 
then, or since. He was none of your hesitating, half story- 
tellers (a most painful description of mortals) who go on 
sounding your belief, and only giving you as much as they 
see you can swallow at a time — the nibbling pickpockets of 
your patience — but one who committed downright, daylight 
depredations upon his neighbor's faith. He did not stand 
shivering upon the brink, but was a hearty, thorough-paced 
liar, and plunged at once into the depths of your credulity. 
I partly believe, he made pretty sure of his company. Not 
many rich, not many wise, or learned, composed at that 
time the common stowage of a Margate packet. We were, 
I am afraid, a set of as unseasoned Londoners (let our ene- 
mies ^ give it a worse name) as Aldermanbury, or Watling 
Street, at that time of day could have supplied. There might 
be an exception or two among us, but I scorn to make any 
invidious distinctions among such a jolly, companionable 
ship's company as those were whom I sailed with. Something 
too must be conceded to the Genius Loci? Had the confident 
fellow told us half the legends on land which he favored us 

^ " Lamb refers to the attacks of Blackwood's Magazine on the 
Cockneys [the London writers], among whom he himself had been 
included." — Lucas. 2 xhe spirit of the place. 



170 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

with on the other element, I flatter myself the good sense of 
most of us would have revolted. But we were in a new world, 
with everything unfamiliar about us, and the time and place 
disposed us to the reception of any prodigious marvel what- 
soever. Time has obliterated from my memory much of his 
wild fablings ; and the rest would appear but dull, as written, 
and to be read on shore. He had been Aide-de-camp (among 
other rare accidents and fortunes) to a Persian Prince, and 
at one blow had stricken off the head of the King of Carimania 
on horseback. He, of course, married the Prince's daughter. 
I forget what unlucky turn in the politics of that court, com- 
bining with the loss of his consort, was the reason of his 
quitting Persia ; but, with the rapidity of a magician, he trans- 
ported himself, along with his hearers, back to England, 
where we still found him in the confidence of great ladies. 
There was some story of a princess — 'Elizabeth, if I re- 
member — having intrusted to his care an extraordinary 
casket of jewels, upon some extraordinary occasion — but, 
as I am not certain of the name or circumstance at this dis- 
tance of time, I must leave it to the Royal daughters of 
England to settle the honor among themselves in private. 
I cannot call to mind half his pleasant wonders; but I per- 
fectly remember that, in the course of his travels, he had seen 
a phoenix; and he obligingly undeceived us of the vulgar 
error, that there is but one of that species at a time, assuring 
us that they were not uncommon in some parts of Upper 
Egypt. Hitherto he had found the most implicit listeners. 
His dreaming fancies had transported us beyond the "igno- 
rant present." ^ But when (still hardying more and more in 
his triumphs over our simplicity) he went on to affirm that 
he had actually sailed through the legs of the Colossus at 
Rhodes, it really became necessary to make a stand. And 
here I must do justice to the good sense and intrepidity of one 
of our party, a youth, that had hitherto been one of his most 
deferential auditors, who, from his recent reading, made bold 
to assure the gentleman, that there must be some mistake, as 
"the Colossus in question had been destroyed long since;" 

1 Macbeth, i. 5. 58. 



THE OLD MARGATE HOY 171 

to whose opinion, delivered with all modesty, our hero was 
obliging enough to concede thus much, that "the figure was 
indeed a little damaged.'' This was the only opposition he 
met with, and it did not at all seem to stagger him, for he 
proceeded with his fables, which the same youth appeared to 
swallow with still more complacency than ever, — confirmed, 
as it were, by the extreme candor of that concession. With 
these prodigies he wheedled us on till we came in sight of the 
Reculvers, which one of our own company (having been 
the voyage before) immediately recognizing, and pointing 
out to us, was considered by us as no ordinary seaman. 

All this time sat upon the edge of the deck quite a different 
character. It was a lad, apparently very poor, very infirm, 
and very patient. His eye was ever on the sea, with a smile ; 
and, if he caught now and then some snatches of these wild 
legends, it was by accident, and they seemed not to concern 
him. The waves to him whispered more pleasant stories. 
He was as one being with us, but not of us. He heard the 
bell of dinner ring without stirring; and when some of us 
pulled out our private stores — our cold meat ^nd our salads 
— he produced none, and seemed to want none. Only a 
solitary biscuit he had laid in; provision for the one or two 
days and nights, to which these vessels then were oftentimes 
obliged to prolong their voyage. Upon a nearer acquaintance 
with him, which he seemed neither to court nor decline, we 
learned that he was going to Margate, with the hope of being 
admitted into the Infirmary there for sea-bathing. His 
disease was a scrofula, which appeared to have eaten all over 
him. He expressed great hopes of a cure; and when we 
asked him whether he had any friends where he was going, he 
replied, ''he had no friends." 

These pleasant, and some mournful passages, with the first 
sight of the sea, cooperating with youth, and a sense of holi- 
days, and out-of-door adventure, to me that had been pent up 
in populous cities for many months before, — have left upon 
my mind the fragrance as of summer days gone by, bequeath- 
ing nothing but their remembrance for cold and wintry hours 
to chew upon. 



172 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

Will it be thought a digression (it may spare some unwel- 
come comparisons) if I endeavor to account for the dis- 
satisfaction which I have heard so many persons confess to 
have felt (as I did myself feel in part on this occasion), at 
the sight of the sea for the first tiyne ? I think the reason usually 
given — referring to the incapacity of actual objects for 
satisfying our preconceptions of them — scarcely goes deep 
enough into the question. Let the same person see a lion, 
an elephant, a mountain, for the first time in his life, and he 
shall perhaps feel himself a little mortified. The things do 
not fill up that space which the idea of them seemed to take 
up in his mind. But they have still a correspondency to his 
first notion, and in time grow up to it, so as to produce a very 
similar impression : enlarging themselves (if I may say so) 
upon familiarity. But the sea rem.ains a disappointment. 
Is it not, that in the latter we had expected to behold (ab- 
surdly, I grant, but, I am afraid, by the law of imagination 
unavoidably) not a definite object, as those wild beasts, or 
that mountain compassable by the eye, but all the sea at 

once, THE COMMENSURATE ANTAGONIST OF THE EARTH? I 

do not say we tell ourselves so much, but the craving of the 
mind is to be satisfied with nothing less. I will suppose the 
case of a young person of fifteen (as I then was) knowing 
nothing of the sea, but from description. He comes to it 
for the first time — all that he has been reading of it all his 
life, and that the most enthusiastic part of life, — all he has 
gathered from narratives of wandering seamen, — what he 
has gained from true voyages, and what he cherishes as 
credulously from romance and poetry, — crowding their 
images, and exacting strange tributes from expectation. — 
He thinks of the great deep, and of those who go down unto 
it ; of its thousand isles, and of the vast continents it washes ; 
of its receiving the mighty Plata, or Orellana, into its bosom, 
without disturbance, or sense of augmentation; of Biscay 
swells, and the mariner 

For many a day, and many a dreadful night, 
Incessant laboring round the stormy Cape ; ^ 

» Thomson's SeasoTis, "Summer/' 1002. 



THE OLD MARGATE HOY 173 

of fatal rocks, and the " still- vexed Bermoothes;" ^ of great 
whirlpools, and the water-spout ; of sunken ships, and sum- 
less treasures swallowed up in the unrestoring depths; of 
fishes and quaint monsters, to which all that is terrible on 
earth — 

Be but as buggs to frighten babes withal, 
Compared with the creatures in the sea's entral ; ^ 

of naked savages, and Juan Fernandez ; of pearls, and shells ; 
of coral beds, and of enchanted isles ; of mermaids' grots — 
I do not assert that in sober earnest he expects to be shown 
all these wonders at once, but he is under the tyranny of a 
mighty faculty, which haunts him with confused hints and 
shadows of all these; and when the actual object opens first 
upon him, seen (in tame weather, too, most likely) from our 
unromantic coasts — a speck, a slip of sea-water, as it shows 
to him — what can it prove but a very unsatisfying and even 
diminutive entertainment ? Or if he has come to it from the 
mouth of a river, was it much more than the river widening ? 
and, even out of sight of land, what had he but a flat watery 
horizon about him, nothing comparable to the vast o'er-cur- 
taining sky, his familiar object, seen daily without dread 
or amazement ? — Who, in similar circumstances, has not 
been tempted to exclaim with Charoba, in the poem of Gebir, 

Is this the mighty ocean ? is this all ? 

1 love town or country ; but this detestable Cinque Port is 
neither. I hate these scrubbed shoots, thrusting out their 
starved foliage from between the horrid fissures of dusty 
innutritions rocks; which the amateur calls ''verdure to the 
edge of the sea." I require woods, and they show me stunted 
coppices. I cry out for the water-brooks, and pant for fresh 
streams, and inland murmurs. I cannot stand all day on the 
naked beach, watching the capricious hues of the sea, shifting 

^ Tempest, i. 2. 229. The passage refers to the ever disturbed 
Bermudas, where the rocks are ever washed by the sea, thus render- 
ing access to them dangerous. 

2 Spenser's Faerie Queene, Bk. II. xii. 25. Buggs means bug-bears. 



174 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELI A 

like the colors of a dying mullet. I am tired of looking out 
at the windows of this island-prison. I would fain retire into 
the interior of my cage. While I gaze upon the sea, I want 
to be on it, over it, across it. It binds me in with chains, as 
of iron. My thoughts are abroad. I should not so feel in 
Staffordshire. There is no home for me here. There is no 
sense of home at Hastings. It is a place of fugitive resort, 
an heterogeneous assemblage of sea-mews and stock-brokers, 
Amphitrites of the town, and misses that coquet with the 
Ocean. If it were what it was in its primitive shape, and 
what it ought to have remained, a fair, honest fishing-town, 
and no more, it were something — with a few straggling fisher- 
men's huts scattered about, artless as its cliffs, and with their 
materials filched from them, it were something. I could abide 
to dwell with Meshech; to assort with fisher-swains, and 
smugglers. There are, or I dream there are, many of this 
latter occupation here. Their faces become the place. I 
like a smuggler. He is the only honest thief. He robs noth- 
ing but the revenue — an abstraction I never greatly cared 
about. I could go out with them in their mackerel boats, or 
about their less ostensible business, with some satisfaction. 
I can even tolerate those poor victims to monotony, who from 
day to day pace along the beach, in endless progress and 
recurrence, to watch their illicit countrymen — townsfolk or 
brethren, perchance — whistling to the sheathing and un- 
sheathing of their cutlasses (their only solace), who, under 
the mild name of preventive service, keep up a legitimated 
civil warfare in the deplorable absence of a foreign one, to 
show their detestation of run hollands, and zeal for Old Eng- 
land. But it is the visitants from town, that come here to 
say that they have been here, with no more relish of the sea 
than a pond-perch or a dace might be supposed to have, that 
are my aversion. I feel like a foolish dace in these regions, 
and have as little toleration for myself here as for them. 
What can they want here ? If they had a true relish of the 
ocean, why have they brought all this land luggage with them ? 
or why pitch their civilized tents in the desert ? What mean 
these scanty bookrooms — marine libraries as they entitle 



THE OLD MARGATE HOY 175 

them — if the sea were, as they would have us believe, a 
book "to read strange matter in"? ^ what are their foolish 
concert-rooms, if they come, as they would fain be thought 
to do, to listen to the music of the waves? All is false and 
hollow pretension. They come because it is the fashion, 
and to spoil the nature of the place. They are, mostly, as I 
have said, stock-brokers ; but I have watched the better sort 
of them — now and then, an honest citizen (of the old stamp), 
in the simplicity of his heart, shall bring down his wife and 
daughters to taste the sea breezes. I always know the date 
of their arrival. It is easy to see it in their countenance. 
A day or two they go wandering on the shingles, picking up 
cockle-shells, and thinking them great things ; but, in a poor 
week, imagination slackens : they begin to discover that 
cockles produce no pearls, and then — then ! — if I could 
interpret for the pretty creatures (I know they have not the 
courage to confess it themselves), how gladly would they ex- 
change their seaside rambles for a Sunday walk on the green 
sward of their accustomed Twickenham meadows ! 

I would ask of one of these sea-charmed emigrants, who think 
they truly love the sea, with its wild usages, what would their 
feelings be if some of the unsophisticated aborigines of this 
place, encouraged by their courteous questionings here, should 
venture, on the faith of such assured sympathy between them, 
to return the visit, and come up to see — London. I must 
imagine them with their fishing-tackle on their back, as we 
carry our town necessaries. What a sensation would it cause 
in Lothbury ! What vehement laughter would it not excite 
among 

The daughters of Cheapside, and wives of Lombard Street ! ^ 

I am sure that no town-bred or inland-born subjects can 
feel their true and natural nourishment at these sea-places. 
Nature, where she does not mean us for mariners and vaga- 
bonds, bids us stay at home. The salt foam seems to nourish 

1 Macbeth, i. 5. 63. 

2 Thomas Randolph's Ode, To Master Anthony Stafford, 

"The beauties of the Cheap, and wives of Lombard Street." 



176 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

a spleen. I a,m not half so good-natured as by the milder 
waters of my natural river. I would exchange these sea-gulls 
for swans, and scud a swallow for ever about the banks of 
Thamesis. 



SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS 

So far from the position holding true, that great wit (or 
genius, in our modern way of speaking) has a necessary alli- 
ance with insanity, the greatest wits, on the contrary, will 
ever be found to be the sanest writers. It is impossible for 
the mind to conceive of a mad Shakspeare. The greatness of 
wit, by which the poetic talent is here chiefly to be understood, 
manifests itself in the admirable balance of all the faculties. 
Madness is the disproportionate straining or excess of any 
one of them. "So strong a wit," ^ says Cowley^ speak- 
ing of a poetical friend, 

did Nature to him frame. 



As all things but his judgment overcame; 

His judgment like the heavenly moon did show, 

Tempering that mighty sea below." 

The ground of the mistake is, that men, finding in the 
raptures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to 
which they have no parallel in their own experience, besides 
the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute 
a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet. But the true poet 
dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject, 
but has dominion over it. In the groves of Eden he walks 
familiar as in his native paths. He ascends the empyrean 
heaven, and is not intoxicated. He treads the burning marl ^ 
without dismay ; he wins his flight without self-loss through 
realms of chaos ''and old night." ^ Or if, abandoning himself 
to that severer chaos of a ''human mind untuned,"^ he is 

^ Cowley's Ode, On the Death of Mr. William Hervey. 
2 Paradise Lost, 1, 295-296. ^ Paradise Lost, i. 541-543. 

* King Lear, iv. 7. 16-17. 



SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS 177 

content awhile to be mad with Lear, or to hate mankind 
(a sort of madness) with Timon, neither is that madness, nor 
this misanthropy, so unchecked, but that — never letting 
the reins of reason wholly go, while most he seems to do so — 
he has his better genius still whispering at his ear, with the 
good servant Kent suggesting saner counsels, or with the 
honest steward Flavins recommending kindlier resolutions. 
Where he seems most to recede from humanity, he will be 
found the truest to it. From beyond the scope of Nature 
if he summon possible existences, he subjugates them to the 
law of her consistency. He is beautifully loyal to that 
sovereign directress, even when he appears most to betray 
and desert her. His ideal tribes submit to pohcy; his very 
monsters are tamed to his hand, even as that wild sea-brood, 
shepherded by Proteus. He tames, and he clothes them with 
attributes of flesh and blood, till they wonder at themselves, 
Hke Indian Islanders forced to submit to European vesture. 
CaHban, the Witches, are as true to the laws of their own 
nature (ours with a difference), as Othello, Hamlet, and Mac- 
beth. Herein the great and the little wits are differenced; 
that if the latter wander ever so little from nature or actual 
existence, they lose themselves and their readers. Their 
phantoms are lawless; their visions nightmares. They do 
not create, which implies shaping and consistency. Their 
imaginations are not active — for to be active is to call some- 
thing into act and form — but passive, as men in sick dreams. 
For the super-natural, or something super-added to what we 
know of nature, they give you the plainly non-natural. And 
if this were all, and that these mental hallucinations were 
discoverable only in the treatment of subjects out of nature, 
or transcending it, the judgment might with some plea be 
pardoned if it ran riot, and a little wantonized: but even 
in the describing of real and every-day life, that which is 
before their eyes, one of these lesser wits shall more deviate 
from nature — show more of that inconsequence, which has 
a natural alliance with frenzy — than a great genius in his 
"maddest fits,'' ^ as Wither somewhere calls them. We 

^ Wither 's Shepherd's Hunting, Eclogue 4. 



178 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

appeal to any one that is acquainted with the common run 
of Lane's novels, — as they existed some twenty or thirty 
years back, — those scanty intellectual viands of the whole 
female reading public, till a happier genius ^ arose, and ex- 
pelled for ever the innutritions phantoms, — whether he has 
not found his brain more ''betossed," his memory more 
puzzled, his sense of when and where more confounded, among 
the improbable events, the incoherent incidents, the- incon- 
sistent characters, or no-characters, of some third-rate love- 
intrigue — where the persons shall be a Lord Glendamour 
and a Miss Rivers, and the scene only alternate between Bath 
and Bond Street — a more bewildering dreaminess induced 
upon him than he has felt wandering over all the fairy- 
grounds of Spenser. In the productions we refer to, nothing 
but names and places is familiar; the persons are neither of 
this world nor of any other conceivable one; an endless 
stream of activities without purpose, of purposes destitute of 
motive : — we meet phantoms in our known walks ; fantasques 
only christened. In the poet we have names which announce 
fiction ; and we have absolutely no place at all, for the things 
and persons of the Fairy Queen prate not of their '^where- 
about." ^ But in their inner nature, and the law of their 
speech and actions, we are at home, and upon acquainted 
ground. The one turns life into a dream; the other to the 
wildest dreams gives the sobrieties of every-day occurrences. 
By what subtle art of tracing the mental processes it is 
effected, we are not philosophers enough to explain, but in 
that wonderful episode of the cave of Mammon, in which the 
Money God appears first in the lowest form of a miser, is 
then a worker of metals, and becomes the god of all the 
treasures of the world ; and has a daughter. Ambition, before 
whom all the world kneels for favors — with the Hesperian 
fruit, the waters of Tantalus, with Pilate washing his hands 
vainly, but not impertinently, in the same stream, — that we 
should be at one moment in the cave of an old hoarder of 
treasures, at the next at the forge of the Cyclops, in a palace 
and yet in hell, all at once, with the shifting mutations of the 

» Sir Walter Scott? 2 Macbeth, ii. 1. 58. 



CAPTAIN JACKSON 179 

most rambling dream, and our judgment yet all the time 
awake, and neither able nor willing to detect the fallacy, — 
is a proof of that hidden sanity which still guides the poet 
in the wildest seeming-aberrations. 

It is not enough to say that the whole episode is a copy of 
the mind's conceptions in sleep ; it is, in some sort — but what 
a copy ! Let the most romantic of us, that has been enter- 
tained all night with the spectacle of some wild and mag- 
nificent vision, recombine it in the morning, and try it by his 
waking judgment. That which appeared so shifting, and yet 
so coherent, while that faculty was passive, when it comes 
under cool examination shall appear so reasonless and so 
unlinked, that we are ashamed to have been so deluded ; and 
to have taken, though but in sleep, a monster for a god. 
But the transitions in this episode are every whit as violent 
as in the most extravagant dream, and yet the waking judg- 
ment ratifies them. 



CAPTAIN JACKSON 

Among the deaths in our obituary for this month, I observe 
with concern "At his cottage on the Bath Road, Captain 
Jackson." The name and attribution are common enough; 
but a feeling like reproach persuades me that this could have 
been no other in fact than my dear old friend, who some 
five-and-twenty years ago rented a tenement, which he was 
pleased to dignify with the appellation here used, about a 
mile from Westbourn Green. Alack, how good men, and the 
good turns they do us, slide out of memory, and are recalled 
but by the surprise of some such sad memento as that which 
now lies before us ! 

He whom I mean was a retired half-pay officer, with a wife 
and two grown-up daughters, whom he maintained with the 
port and notions of gentlewomen upon that slender profes- 
sional allowance. Comely girls they were, too. 

And was I in danger of forgetting this man ? — his cheerful 



180 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

suppers — the noble tone of hospitality, when first you set 
your foot in the cottage — the anxious ministerings about 
you, where little or nothing (God knows) was to be minis- 
tered. — Althea's horn in a poor platter — the power of self- 
enchantment, by which, in his magnificent wishes to entertain 
you, he multiplied his means to bounties. 

You saw with your bodily eyes indeed what seemed a 
bare scrag — cold savings from the foregone meal — remnant 
hardly sufficient to send a mendicant from the door contented. 
But in the copious will — the revelling imagination of your 
host — the ''mind, the mind. Master Shallow," ^ whole beeves 
were spread before you — hecatombs — no end appeared 
to the profusion. 

It was the widow's cruse ^ — the loaves and fishes ; ^ 
carving could not lessen, nor helping diminish it — the stamina 
were left — the elemental bone still flourished, divested of its 
accidents. 

"Let us live while we can," methinks I hear the open- 
handed creature exclaim; "while we have, let us not want," 
" here is plenty left ; " " want for nothing " — with many more 
such hospitable sayings, the spurs of appetite, and old con- 
comitants of smoking boards and feast-oppressed chargers. 
Then sliding a slender ratio of Single Gloucester upon his 
wife's plate, or the daughters', he would convey the remanent 
rind into his own, with a merry quirk of "the nearer the 
bone," etc., and declaring that he universally preferred the 
outside. For we had our table distinctions, you are to know, 
and some of us in a manner sate above the salt. None but 
his guest or guests dreamed of tasting flesh luxuries at night, 
the fragments were vere hospitibus sacra.^ But of one thing 
or another there was always enough, and leavings : only 
he would sometimes finish the remainder crust, to show that 
he wished no savings. 

Wine we had none ; nor, except on very rare occasions, 
spirits; but the sensation of wine was there. Some thin 

^ A remembrance from 2 Henry IV. iii. 2. 278. 

2 1 Kings xvii. 16, and Matthew xv. 32 fif. 

3 Truly sacred to the guests. 



CAPTAIN JACKSON 181 

kind of ale I remember — "British beverage," he would say ! 
"Push about, my boys;" "Drink to your sweethearts, girls." 
At every meagre draught a toast must ensue, or a song. All 
the forms of good liquor were there, with none of the effects 
wanting. ' Shut your eyes, and you would swear a capacious 
bowl of punch was foaming in the centre, with beams of gener- 
ous Port or Madeira radiating to it from each of the table 
corners. You got flustered, without knowing whence ; tipsy 
upon words; and reeled under the potency of his unper- 
forming Bacchanalian encouragements. 

We had our songs — "Why, Soldiers, why," — and the 
"British Grenadiers"^ — in which last we were all obliged 
to bear chorus. Both the daughters sang. Their profi- 
ciency was a nightly theme — the masters he had given 
them — the "no-expense" which he spared to accomplish 
them in a science "so necessary to young women." But 
then — they could not sing "without the instrument." 

Sacred, and, by me, never-to-be-violated, secrets of Pov- 
erty ! Should I disclose your honest aims at grandeur, your 
makeshift efforts of magnificence? Sleep, sleep, with all 
thy broken keys, if one of the bunch be extant ; thrummed 
by a thousand ancestral thumbs; dear, cracked spinnet of 
dearer Louisa ! Without mention of mine, be dumb, thou 
thin accompanier of her thinner warble ! A veil be spread 
over the dear delighted face of the well-deluded father, who, 
now haply listening to cherubic notes, scarce feels sincerer 
pleasure than when she awakened thy time-shaken chords 
responsive to the twitterings of that slender image of a voice. 

We were not without our literary talk either. It did not 
extend far, but as far as it went it was good. It was bot- 
tomed well; had good grounds to go upon. In the cottage 
was a room, which tradition authenticated to have been the 

^ " This popular song was composed at the end of the seventeenth 
century, not earlier than 1678, when the Grenadier Company was 
formed, nor later than the reign of Queen Anne, when grenadiers 
ceased to carry hand grenades. The poet Campbell's song. Upon 
the Plains of Flanders, also bears the same title, but is less known." — 
Hallward. 



182 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

same in which Glover, in his occasional retirements, had 
penned the greater part of his Leonidas. This circumstance 
was nightly quoted, though none of the present inmates, that 
I could discover, appeared ever to have met with the poem 
in question. But that was no matter. Glover had written 
there, and the anecdote was pressed into the account of the 
family importance. It diffused a learned air through the 
apartment, the little side casement of which (the poet's 
study window), opening upon a superb view as far as the 
pretty spire of Harrow, over domains and patrimonial acres, 
not a rood nor square yard whereof our host could call his 
own, yet gave occasion to an immoderate expansion of — 
vanity shall I call it ? — in his bosom, as he showed them in a 
glowing summer evening. It was all his, he took it all in, 
and communicated rich portions of it to his guests. It was 
a part of his largess, his hospitality; it was going over his 
grounds ; he was lord for the time of showing them, and you 
the implicit lookers-up to his magnificence. 

He was a juggler, who threw mists before your eyes — 
you had no time to detect his fallacies. He would say, '* Hand 
me the silver sugar-tongs;" and before you could discover it 
was a single spoon, and that plated, he would disturb and 
captivate your imagination by a misnomer of ''the urn" for 
a tea-kettle; or by calhng a homely bench a sofa. Rich 
men direct you to their furniture, poor ones divert you from 
it ; he neither did one nor the other, but by simply assuming 
that everything was handsome about him, you were posi- 
tively at a demur what you did, or did not see, at the cottage. 
With nothing to live on, he seemed to live on everything. 
He had a stock of wealth in his mind; not that which is 
properly termed Content, for in truth he was not to be con- 
tained at all, but overflowed all bounds by the force of a 
magnificent self-delusion. 

Enthusiasm is catching ; and even his wife, a sober native 
of North Britain, who generally saw things more as they were, 
was not proof against the continual collision of his credulity. 
Her daughters were rational and discreet young women; 
in the main, perhaps, not insensible to their true circum- 



CAPTAIN JACKSON 183 

stances. I have seen them assume a thoughtful air at times. 
But such was the preponderating opulence of his fancy, that 
I am persuaded not for any half hour together did they ever 
look their own prospects fairly in the face. There was no 
resisting the vortex of his temperament. His riotous imagina- 
tion conjured up handsome settlements before their eyes, 
which kept them up in the eye of the world too, and seem at 
last to have realized themselves ; for they both have married 
since, I am told, more than respectably. 

It is long since, and my memory waxes dim on some sub- 
jects, or I should wish to convey some notion of the manner 
in which the pleasant creature described the circumstances 
of his own wedding-day. I faintly remember something of 
a chaise-and-four, in which he made his entry into Glasgow 
on that morning to fetch the bride home, or carry her thither, 
I forget which. It so completely made out the stanza of the 
old ballad ' — 

When we came down through Glasgow town, 

We were a comely sight to see; 
My love was clad in black velvet. 

And I myself in cramasie. 

I suppose it was the only occasion upon which his own 
actual splendor at all corresponded with the world's notions 
on that subject. In homely cart, or traveUing caravan, by 
whatever humble vehicle they chanced to be transported in 
less prosperous days, the ride through Glasgow came back 
upon his fancy, not as a humiliating contrast, but as a fair 
occasion for reverting to that one day's state. It seemed an 
''equipage etern" from which no power of fate or fortune, 
once mounted, had power thereafter to dislodge him. 

There is some merit in putting a handsome face upon 
indigent circumstances. To bully and swagger away the 
sense of them before strangers, may not be always discom- 
mendable. Tibbs, and Bobadil, even when detected, have 
more of our admiration than contempt. But for a man to 
put the cheat upon himself ; to play the Bobadil at home ; and 

1 From the old popular ballad, "Waly, Waly." 



184 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

steeped in poverty up to the lips, to fancy himself all the while 
chin-deep in riches, is a strain of constitutional philosophy, 
and a mastery over fortune, which was reserved for my old 
friend Captain Jackson. 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 

Sera tamen respexit 
Libertas.^ Vergil. 

A Clerk I was in London gay. — O'Keefe. 

If perad venture, Reader, it has been thy lot to waste the 
golden years of thy life — thy shining youth — in the irk- 
some confinement of an office ; to have thy prison days 
prolonged through middle age down to decrepitude and silver 
hairs, without hope of release or respite; to have lived to 
forget that there are such things as holidays, or to remember 
them but as the prerogatives of childhood; then, and then 
only, will you be able to appreciate my deliverance. 

It is now six-and-thirty years since I took my seat at the 
desk in Mincing Lane. Melancholy was the transition at 
fourteen from the abundant playtime, and the frequently- 
intervening vacations of schooldays, to the eight, nine, and 
sometimes ten hours'" a-day attendance at a counting-house. 
But time partially reconciles us to anything. I gradually 
became content — doggedly contented, as wild animals in 
cages. 

It is true I had my Sundays to myself; but Sundays, 
admirable as the institution of them is for purposes of wor- 
ship, are for that very reason the very worst adapted for 
days of unbending and recreation. In particular, there is a 
gloom for me attendant upon a city Sunday, a weight in 
the air. I miss the cheerful cries of London, the music, and 
the ballad-singers — the buzz and stirring murmur of the 

^ Adapted from Vergil's Eclogue, i. 28, Lihertas, quae sera tamen 
respexit inertem, Liberty, though late, at last looks in on the idler. 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 185 

streets. Those eternal bells depress me. The closed shops 
repel me. Prints, pictures, all the glittering and endless 
succession of knacks and gewgaws, and ostentatiously dis- 
played wares of tradesmen, which make a weekday saunter 
through the less busy parts of the metropolis so delightful — 
are shut out. No book-stalls deliciously to idle over — no 
busy faces to recreate the idle man who contemplates them 
ever passing by — the very face of business a charm by 
contrast to his temporary relaxation from it. Nothing to 
be seen but unhappy countenances — or half-happy at best — 
of emancipated 'prentices and little tradesfolks, with here 
and there a servant-maid that has got leave to go out, who, 
slaving all the week, with the habit has lost almost the capac- 
ity of enjoying a free hour ; and livelily expressing the hollow- 
ness of a day's pleasuring. The very strollers in the fields 
on that day look anything but comfortable. 

But besides Sundays, I had a day at Easter, and a day 
at Christmas, with a full week in the summer to go and air 
myself in my native fields of Hertfordshire. This last was 
a great indulgence; and the prospect of its recurrence, I 
believe, alone kept me up through the year, and made my 
durance tolerable. But when the week came round, did the 
glittering phantom of the distance keep touch with me ? or 
rather was it not a series of seven uneasy days, spent in rest- 
less pursuit of pleasure, and a wearisome anxiety to find out 
how to make the most of them ? Where was the quiet, where 
the promised rest ? Before I had a taste of it, it was vanished. 
I was at the desk again, counting upon the fifty-one tedious 
weeks that must intervene before such another snatch would 
come. Still the prospect of its coming threw something of 
an illumination upon the darker side of my captivity. With- 
out it, as I have said, I could scarcely have sustained my 
thraldom. 

Independently of the rigors of attendance, I have ever 
been haunted with a sense (perhaps a mere caprice) of inca- 
pacity for business. This, during my latter years, had in- 
creased to such a degree, that it was visible in all the lines of 
my countenance. My health and my good spirits flagged. 



186 . THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

I had perpetually a dread of some crisis, to which I should be 
found unequal. Besides my daylight servitude, I served 
over again all night in my sleep, and would awake with 
terrors of imaginary false entries, errors in my accounts, and 
the like. I was fifty years of age, and no prospect of emanci- 
pation presented itself. I had grown to "my desk, as it were; 
and the wood had entered into my soul. 

My fellows in the office would sometimes rally me upon 
the trouble legible in my countenance; but I did not know 
that it had raised the suspicions of any of my employers, 
when, on the fifth of last month, a day ever to be remembered 

by me, L , the junior partner in the firm, calling me 

on one side, directly taxed me with my bad looks, and 
frankly inquired the cause of them. So taxed, I honestly 
made confession of my infirmity, and added that I was 
afraid I should eventually be obliged to resign his service. 
He spoke some words of course to hearten me, and there the 
matter rested. A whole week I remained laboring under 
the impression that I had acted imprudently in my dis- 
closure; that I had foolishly given a handle against myself, 
and had been anticipating my own dismissal. A week passed 
in this manner — the most anxious one, I verily believe, 
in my whole life — when on the evening of the 12th of April, 
just as I was about quitting my desk to go home (it might 
be about eight o'clock), I received an awful summons to 
attend the presence of the whole assembled firm in the for- 
midable back parlor. I thought now my time is surely 
come, I have done for myself, I am going to be told that they 

have no longer occasion for me. L , I could see, smiled 

at the terror I was in, which was a little relief to me, — 

when to my utter astonishment B , the eldest partner, 

began a formal harangue to me on the length of my services, 
my very meritorious conduct during the whole of the time 
(the deuce, thought I, how did he find out that? I protest 
I never had the confidence to think as much). He went on 
to descant on the expediency of retiring at a certain time of 
life (how my heart panted !) and asking me a few questions 
as to the amount of my own property, of which I have a little. 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 187 

ended with a proposal, to which his three partners nodded 
a grave assent, that I should accept from the house, which 
I had served so well, a pension for life to the amount of two- 
thirds of my accustomed salary — a magnificent offer ! I 
do not know what I answered between surprise and gratitude, 
but it was understood that I accepted their proposal, and 
I was told that I was free from that hour to leave their 
service. I stammered out a bow, and at just ten minutes 
after eight I went home — for ever. This noble benefit — 
gratitude forbids me to conceal their names — I owe to the 
kindness of the most munificent firm in the world — the 
house of Boldero, Merryweather, Bosanquet, and Lacy. 

Esto perpetual ^ 

For the first day or two I felt stunned — overwhelmed. 
I could only apprehend my felicity; I was too confused 
to taste it sincerely. I wandered about, thinking I was 
happy, and knowing that I was not. I was in the condition 
of a prisoner in the old Bastile, suddenly let loose after a 
forty years' confinement. I could scarce trust myself with 
myself. It was like passing out of Time into Eternity — 
for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to have his Time all to 
himself. It seemed to me that I had more time on my hands 
than I could ever manage. From a poor man, poor in Time, 
I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see 
no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judi- 
cious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me. And 
here let me caution persons grown old in active business, 
not lightly, nor without weighing their own resources, to 
forego their customary employment all at once, for there 
may be danger in it. I feel it by myself, but I know that 
my resources are sufficient; and now that those first giddy 
raptures have subsided, I have a quiet home-feeling of the 
blessedness of my condition. I am in no hurry. Having 
all holidays, I am as though I had none. " If Time hung heavy 
upon me, I could walk it away; but I do not walk all day 

^ "Be thou continual!" The dying words of Paolo Sarpi (1552- 
1623), spoken of his beloved Venice. 



188 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

long, as I used to do in those old transient holidays, thirty 
miles a day, to make the most of them. If Time were 
troublesome, I could read it away ; but I do not read in that 
violent measure, with which, having no Time my own but 
candlelight Time, I used to weary out my head and eyesight 
in bygone winters. I walk, read, or scribble (as now) just 
when the fit seizes me. I no longer hunt after pleasure; 
I let it come to me. I am like the man 

that's born, and has his years come to him, 



In some green desert.^ 

*' Years !" you will say; "what is this superannuated simple- 
ton calculating upon? He has already told us he is past 
fifty." 

I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct 
out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, 
and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. 
For that is the only true Time, which a man can properly 
call his own — that which he has all to himself ; the rest, 
though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other 
people's Time, not his. The remnant of my poor days, 
long or short, is at least multiplied for me threefold. My 
ten next years, if I stretch so far, will be as long as any pre- 
ceding thirty. 'Tis a fair rule-of-three sum. 

Among the strange fantasies which beset me at the com- 
mencement of my freedom, and of which all traces are not 
yet gone, one was, that a vast tract of time had intervened 
since I quitted the Counting House. I could not conceive 
of it as an affair of yesterday. The partners, and the clerks 
with whom I had for so many years, and for so many hours 
in each day of the year, been closely associated — being sud- 
denly removed from them — they seemed as dead to me. 
There is a fine passage, which may serve to illustrate this 
fancy, in a Tragedy by Sir Robert Howard, speaking of a 
friend's death : — 

'Twas but just now he went away; 



I have not since had time to shed a tear; 
^ Middleton's Mayor of QueensboroiLgh, i. 1. 101-103. 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 189 

And yet the distance does the same appear 
As if he had been a thousand years from me. 
Time takes no measure in Eternity.^ 

To dissipate this awkward feehng, I have been fain to 
go among them once or twice since; to visit my old desk- 
fellows — my co-brethren of the quill — that I had left 
below in the state militant. Not all the kindness with 
which they received me could quite restore to me that 
pleasant familiarity, which I had heretofore enjoyed among 
them. We cracked some of our old jokes, but methought 
they went off but faintly. My old desk; the peg where 
I hung my hat, were appropriated to another. I knew it 

must be, but I could not take it kindly. D 1 take me, 

if I did not feel some remorse — beast, if I had not — at 
quitting my old compeers, the faithful partners of my toils 
for six-and-thirty years, that smoothed for me with their 
jokes and conundrums the ruggedness of my professional 
road. Had it been so rugged then, after all? or was I a 
coward simply ? Well, it is too late to repent ; and I also 
know that these suggestions are a common fallacy of the 
mind on such occasions. But my heart smote me. I had 
violently broken the bands betwixt us. It was at least not 
courteous. I shall be some time before I get quite recon- 
ciled to the separation. Farewell, old cronies, yet not for 
long, for again and again I will come among ye, if I shall 

have your leave. Farewell, Ch , dry, sarcastic, and 

friendly! Do , mild, slow to move, and gentlemanly! 

PI , officious to do, and to volunteer, good services ! — 

and thou, thou dreary pile, fit mansion for a Gresham or a 
Whittington of old, stately house of Merchants; with thy 
labyrinthine passages, and light-excluding, pent-up offices, 
where candles for one-half the year supplied the place of 
the sun's fight; -unhealthy contributor to my weal, stern 
fosterer of my living, farewell ! In thee remain, and not in 
the obscure collection of some wandering bookseller, my 
"works!" There let them rest, as I do from my labors, 

* The Vestal Virgin, or the Roman Ladies, v. 1. 



190 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

piled on thy massy shelves, more MSS. in folio than ever 
Aquinas left, and full as useful ! My mantle I bequeath 
among ye. 

A fortnight has passed since the date of my first com- 
munication. At that period I was approaching to tran- 
quillity, but had not reached it. I boasted of a calm indeed, 
but it was comparative only. Something of the first flutter 
was left ; an unsettling sense of novelty ; the dazzle to weak 
eyes of unaccustomed light. I missed my old chains, for- 
sooth, as if they had been some necessary part of my apparel. 
I was a poor Carthusian, from strict cellular discipline sud- 
denly by some revolution returned upon the world. I am 
now as if I had never been other than my own master. It 
is natural for me to go where I please, to do what I please. 
I find myself at 11 o'clock in the day in Bond Street, and it 
seems to me that I have been sauntering there at that very 
hour for years past. I digress into Soho, to explore a book- 
stall. Methinks I have been thirty years a collector. There 
is nothing strange nor new in it. I find myself before a fine 
picture in the morning. Was it ever otherwise? What is 
become of Fish Street Hill? Where is Fenchurch Street? 
Stones of old Mincing Lane, which I have worn with my 
daily pilgrimage for six-and-thirty years, to the footsteps 
of what toil-worn clerk are your everlasting flints now vocal ? 
I indent the gayer flags of Pall Mall. It is 'Change time, 
and I am strangely among the Elgin marbles. It was no 
hyperbole when I ventured to compare the change in my 
condition to passing into another world. Time stands 
still in a manner to me. I have lost all distinction of season. 
I do not know the day of the week or of the month. Each 
day used to be individually felt by me in its reference to the 
foreign post days; in its distance from, or propinquity to, 
the next Sunday. I had my Wednesday feelings, my Satur- 
day nights' sensations. The genius of each day was upon me 
distinctly during the whole of it, affecting my appetite, 
spirits, etc. The phantom of the next day, with the dreary 
five to follow, sate as a load upon my poor Sabbath recrea- 
tions. What charm has washed that Ethiop white ? What 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 191 

is gone of Black Monday? All days are the same. Sunday 
itself — that unfortunate failure of a holiday, as it too often 
proved, what with my sense of its fugitiveness, and over- 
care to get the greatest quantity of pleasure out of it — is 
melted down into a week-day. I can spare to go to church 
now, without grudging the huge cantle which it used to 
seem to cut out of the holiday. I have Time for everything. 
I can visit a sick friend. I can interrupt the man of much 
occupation when he is busiest. I can insult over him with 
an invitation to take a day's pleasure with me to Windsor 
this fine May-morning. It is Lucretian pleasure to behold 
the poor drudges, whom I have left behind in the world, 
carking and caring; like horses in a mill, drudging on in 
the same eternal round — and what is it all for ? A man 
can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little 
to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him Nothing- 
to-do; he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is 
out of his element as long as he is operative. I am alto- 
gether for the life contemplative. Will no kindly earthquake 
come and swallow up those accursed cotton mills? Take 
me that lumber of a desk there, and bowl it down 

As low as to the fiends.^ 

I am no longer . . ., clerk to the Firm of, etc. I am 
Retired Leisure.^ I am to be met with in trim gardens. 
I am already come to be known by my vacant face and care- 
less gesture, perambulating at no fixed pace, nor with any 
settled purpose. I walk about; not to and from. They 
tell me, a certain cum dignitate ^ air, that has been buried so 
long with my other good parts, has begun to shoot forth in 
my person. I grow into gentility perceptibly. When I 
take up a newspaper, it is to read the state of the opera. 
Opus operatum est. * I have done all that I came into this 
world to do. I have worked task-work, and have the rest 
of the day to myself. 

1 Hamlet, ii. 2. 517-519. 2 ji Penseroso, 49-50. 

^ Part of a popular Latin proverb, Otium cum dignitate, leisure 
with dignity. * My work is finished. 



192 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 



BARBARA S- 



On the noon of the 14th of November, 1743 or 4, I for- 
get which it was, just as the clock had struck one, Barbara 

S , with her accustomed punctuahty, ascended the long 

rambling staircase, with awkward interposed landing-places, 
which led to the office, or rather a sort of box with a desk 
in it, whereat sat the then treasurer of (what few of our 
readers may remember) the old Bath Theatre. All over 
the island it was the custom, and remains so I believe to 
this day, for the players to receive their weekly stipend on 
the Saturday. ' It was not much that Barbara had to claim. 

The little maid had just entered her eleventh year; but 
her important station at the theatre, as it seemed to her, 
with the benefits which she felt to accrue from her pious 
application of her small earnings, had given an air of woman- 
hood to her steps and to her behavior. You would have 
taken her to have been at least five years older. 

Till latterly she had merely been employed in choruses, 
or where children were wanted to fill up the scene. But 
the manager, observing a diligence and adroitness in her 
above her age, had for some few months past intrusted to 
her the performance of whole parts. You may guess the 
self-consequence of the promoted Barbara. She had al- 
ready drawn tears in young Arthur,^ had rallied Richard 
with infantine petulance in the Duke of York; and in her 
turn had rebuked that petulance when she was Prince of 
Wales. She would have done the elder child in Morton's 
pathetic afterpiece to the life; but as yet the "Children in 
the Wood" was not. 

Long after this little girl was grown an aged woman, 
I have seen some of these small parts, each making two 
or three pages at most, copied out in the rudest hand of 
the then prompter, who doubtless transcribed a little more 

^ Her sympathetic interpretation of the part of Prince Arthur in 
King Jrohn drew tears from the spectators. 



BARBARA S • 193 

carefully and fairly for the grown-up tragedy ladies of the 
establishment. But such as they were, blotted and scrawled, 
as for a child's use, she kept them all ; and in the zenith of 
her after-reputation it was a delightful sight to behold them 
bound up in costliest morocco, each single — each small 
part making a book — with fine clasps, gilt-splashed, etc. 
She had conscientiously kept them as they had been de- 
livered to her ; not a blot had been effaced or tampered with. 
They were precious to her for their affecting remembrancings. 
They were her principia, her rudiments; the elementary 
atoms; the little steps by which she pressed forward to 
perfection. "What,'' she would say, "could India-rubber, 
or a pumice-stone, have done for these darlings?" 

I am in no hurry to begin my story — indeed, I have 
little or none to tell — so I will just mention an observation 
of hers connected with that interesting time. 

Not long before she died I had been discoursing with her 
on the quantity of real present emotion which a great tragic 
performer experiences during acting. I ventured to think, 
that though in the first instance such players must have 
possessed the feelings which they so powerfully called up 
in others, yet by frequent repetition those feelings must 
become deadened in great measure, and the performer trust 
to the memory of past emotion, rather than express a present 
one. She indignantly repelled the notion, that with a 
truly great tragedian the operation, by which such effects 
were produced upon an audience, could ever degrade itself 
into what was purely mechanical. With much delicacy, 
avoiding to instance in her seZ/-experience, she told me, 
that so long ago as when she used to play the part of the 
Little Son to Mrs. Porter's Isabella (I think it was), when 
that impressive actress has been bending over her in some 
heart-rending colloquy, she has felt real hot tears come 
trickling from her, which (to use her powerful expression) 
have perfectly scalded her back. 

I am not quite so sure that it was Mrs. Porter ; but it was 
some great actress of that day. The name is indifferent ; 
but- the fast of the scalding tears I most distinctly remember. 



194 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

I was always fond of the society of players, and am not 
sure that an impediment in my speech (which certainly 
kept me out of the pulpit), even more than certain personal 
disqualifications, which are often got over in that profession, 
did not prevent me at one time of life from adopting it. I 
have had the honor (I must ever call it) once to have been 
admitted to the tea-table of Miss Kelly. I have played at 
serious whist with Mr. Liston. I have chatted with ever 
good-humored Mrs. Charles Kemble. I have conversed as 
friend to friend with her accomplished husband. I have 
been indulged with a classical conference with Macready ; and 
with a sight of the Player-picture gallery, at Mr. Mathews's, 
when the kind owner, to remunerate me for my love of the 
old actors (whom he loves so much), went over it with me, 
supplying to his capital collection, what alone the artist 
could not give them — voice ; and their living motion. Old 
tones, half-faded, of Dodd, and Parsons, and Baddeley, have 
lived again for me at his bidding. Only Edwin he could not 
restore to me. I have supped with ; but I am grow- 
ing a coxcomb. 

As I was about to say — at the desk of the then treas- 
urer of the old Bath Theatre — not Diamond's — presented 
herself the little Barbara S . 

The parents of Barbara had been in reputable circum- 
stances. The father had practised, I believe, as an apothe- 
cary in the town. But his practice, from causes which I 
feel my own infirmity too sensibly that way to arraign — 
or perhaps from that pure infelicity which accompanies some 
people in their walk through life, and which it is impossible 
to lay at the door of imprudence — was now reduced to 
nothing. They were, in fact, in the very teeth of starvation, 
when the manager, who knew and respected them in better 
days, took the little Barbara into his company. 

At the period I commenced with, her slender earnings were 
the sole support of the family, including two younger sisters. 
I must throw a veil over some mortifying circumstances. 
Enough to say, that her Saturday's pittance was the only 
chance of a Sunday's (generally their only) meal of meat. 



BARBARA S 195 

One thing I will only mention, that in some child's part, 
where in her theatrical character she was to sup off a roast 
fowP (O joy to Barbara!), some comic actor, who was for 
the night caterer for this dainty — in the misguided humor 
of his part, threw over the dish such a quantity of salt (O 
grief and pain of heart to Barbara !) that when he crammed 
a portion of it into her mouth, she was obliged sputteringly 
to reject it; and what with shame of her ill-acted part, and 
pain of real appetite at missing such a dainty, her little 
heart sobbed almost to breaking, till a flood of tears, which 
the well-fed spectators were totally unable to comprehend, 
mercifully relieved her. 

This was the little starved, meritorious maid, who stood 
before old Ravenscroft, the treasurer, for her Saturday's 
payment. 

Ravenscroft was a man, I have heard many old theatrical 
people besides herself say, of all men least calculated for a 
treasurer. He had no head for accounts, paid away at 
random, kept scarce any books, and summing up at the 
week's end, if he found himself a pound or so deficient, blest 
himself that it was no worse. 

Now Barbara's weekly stipend was a bare half-guinea. 
— By mistake he popped into her hand — a whole one. 

Barbara tripped away. 

She was entirely unconscious at first of the mistake : 
God knows, Ravenscroft would never have discovered it. 

But when she had got down to the first of those uncouth 
landing-places, she became sensible of an unusual weight 
of metal pressing her little hand. 

Now mark the dilemma. 

She was by nature a good child. From her parents and 
those about her, she had imbibed no contrary influence. 
But then they had taught her nothing. Poor men's smoky 

^ '' It was in the character of the elder child in The Children in the 
Wood that the incident of the roast fowl and the spilt salt occurred 
to Miss Kelly. The famished children, just rescued from the wood, 
are fed by the faithful Walter with a roast chicken, over which he 
has just before, in his agitation, upset the salt-box. " — Ainqee. 



196 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

cabins are not always porticoes of moral philosophy. This 
little maid had no instinct to evil, but then she might be said 
to have no fixed principle. She had heard honesty com- 
mended, but never dreamed of its application to herself. 
She thought of it as something which concerned grown-up 
people, men and women. She had never known temptation, 
or thought of preparing resistance against it. 

Her first impulse was to go back to the old treasurer, 
and explain to him his blunder. He was already so con- 
fused with age, besides a natural want of punctuality, that 
she would have had some difficulty in making him understand 
it. She saw that in an instant. And then it was such a 
bit of money ! and then the image of a larger allowance of 
butcher's meat on their table the next day came across her, 
till her little eyes glistened, and her mouth moistened. But 
then Mr. Ravenscroft had always been so good-natured, 
had stood her friend behind the scenes, and even recom- 
mended her promotion to some of her little parts. But again 
the old man was reputed to be worth a world of money. He 
was supposed to have fifty pounds a year clear of the theatre. 
And then came staring upon her the figures of her little 
stockingless and shoeless sisters. And when she looked 
at her own neat white cotton stockings, which her situation 
at the theatre had made it indispensable for her mother to 
provide for her, with hard straining and pinching from the 
family stock, and thought how glad she should be to cover 
their poor feet with the same — and how then they could 
accompany her to rehearsals, which they had hitherto been 
precluded from doing, by reason of their unfashionable 
attire, — in these thoughts she reached the second landing- 
place — the second, I mean, from the top — for there was 
still another left to traverse. 

Now virtue support Barbara! 

And that never-failing friend did step' in — for at that 
moment a strength not her own, I have heard her say, was 
revealed to her — a reason above reasoning — and with- 
out her own agency, as it seemed (for she never felt her 
feet to move), she found herself transported back to the 



THE NEW year's COMING OF AGE 197 

individual desk she had just quitted, and her hand in the 
old hand of Ravenscroft, who in silence took back the re- 
funded treasure, and who had been sitting (good man) 
insensible to the lapse of minutes, which to her were anxious 
ages, and from that moment a deep peace fell upon her 
heart, and she knew the quality of honesty. 

A year or two's unrepining application to her profession 
brightened up the feet, and the prospects, of her little sisters, set 
the whole family upon their legs again, and released her from 
the difficulty of discussing moral dogmas upon a landing-place. 

I have heard her say that it was a surprise, not much 
short of mortification to her, to see the coolness with which 
the old man pocketed the difference, which had caused her 
such mortal throes. 

This anecdote of herself I had in the year 1800, from the 
mouth of the late Mrs. Crawford,^ then sixty-seven years of 
age (she died soon after) ; and to her struggles upon this 
childish occasion I have sometimes ventured to think her 
indebted for that power of rending the heart in the repre- 
sentation of conflicting emotions, for which in after-years 
she was considered as little inferior (if at all so in the part 
of Lady E-andolph) even to Mrs. Siddons. 



REJOICINGS UPON THE NEW YEAR'S COMING OF 

AGE 

The Old Year being dead, and the New Year coming of 
age, which he does, by Calendar Law, as soon as the breath 
is out of the old gentleman's body, nothing would serve the 
young spark but he must givo a dinner upon the occasion, 
to which all the Days in the year were invited. The Festivals, 
whom he deputed as his stewards, were mightily taken with 

^ The maiden name of this lady was Street, which she changed, 
by successive marriages, for those of Dancer, Barry, and Crawford. 
She was Mrs. Crawford, a third time a widow, when I knew her. 
[Lamb's note.] 



198 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

the notion. They had been engaged time out of mind, 
they said, in providing mirth and good cheer for mortals 
below; and it was time they should have a taste of their 
own bounty. It was stiffly debated among them whether 
the Fasts should be admitted. Some said the appearance 
of such lean, starved guests, with their mortified faces, 
would pervert the ends of the meeting. But the objection 
was overruled by Christmas Day, who had a design upon 
Ash Wednesday (as you shall hear), and a mighty desire 
to see how the old Domine would behave himself in his cups. 
Only the Vigils were requested to come with their lanterns, 
to light the gentlefolks home at night. 

All the Days came to their day. Covers were provided 
for three hundred and sixty-five guests at the principal table ; 
with an occasional knife and fork at the side-board for the 
Twenty-Ninth of February. 

I should have told you that cards of invitation had been 
issued. The carriers were the Hours; twelve little, merry, 
whirligig foot-pages, as you should desire to see, that went 
all round, and found out the persons invited well enough, 
with the exception of Easter Day, Shrove Tuesday, and a few 
such Moveables, who had lately shifted their quarters. 

Well, they all met at last — foul Days, fine Days, all sorts 
of Days, and a rare din they made of it. There was nothing 
but, Hail ! fellow Day, well met — brother Day — sister Day 
— only Lady Day kept a little on the aloof, and seemed some- 
what scornful. Yet some said Twelfth Day cut her out and 
out, for she came in a tiffany suit, white and gold, like a queen 
on a frost-cake, all royal, glittering, and Epiphanous. The 
rest came, some in green, some in white — but old Lent and 
his family were not yet out of mourning. Rainy Days came 
in, dripping ; and sunshiny Days helped them to change their 
stockings. Wedding Day was there in his marriage finery, a 
little the worse for wear. Pay Day came late, as he always 
does ; and Doomsday sent word — he might be expected. 

April Fool (as my young lord's jester) took upon him- 
self to marshal the guests, and wild work he made with 
it. It would have posed old Erra Pater to have found out 



THE NEW year's COMING OF AGE 199 

any given Day in the year to erect a scheme upon — good 
Days, bad Days, were so shuffled together, to the confounding 
of all sober horoscopy. 

He had stuck the Twenty-First of June next to the Twenty- 
Second of December, and the former looked like a Maypole 
siding a marrow-bone. Ash Wed7iesday got wedged in (as was 
concerted) betwixt Christmas and Lord Mayor's Day. Lord ! 
how he laid about him! Nothing but barons of beef and 
turkeys would go down with him — to the great greasing and 
detriment of his new sackcloth bib and tucker. And still Christ- 
mas Day was at his elbow, plying him with the wassail-bowl, 
till he roared, and hiccupp'd, and protested there was no faith 
in dried ling, but commended it to the devil for a sour, windy, 
acrimonious, censorious, hy-po-crit-crit-critical mess,, and no 
dish for a gentleman. Then he dipt his fist into the middle of 
the great custard that stood before his left-hand neighbor, and 
daubed his hungry beard all over with it, till you would have 
taken him for the Last Day in December, it so hung in icicles. 

At another part of the table, Shrove Tuesday was helping 
the Second of September to some cock broth, — which courtesy 
the latter returned with the delicate thigh of a hen pheasant 
— so that there was no love lost for that matter. The Last 
of Lent was spunging upon Shrove-tide's pancakes; which 
April Fool perceiving, told him that he did well, for pancakes 
were proper to a good fry-day. 

In another part, a hubbub arose about the Thirtieth of 
January, who, it seems, being a sour, puritanic character, 
that thought nobody's meat good or sanctified enough for 
him, had smuggled into the room a calf's head, which he 
had had cooked at home for that purpose, thinking to feast 
thereon incontinently; but as it lay in the dish, March 
Many weathers, who is a very fine lady, and subject to the 
meagrims, screamed out there was a "human head in the 
platter," and raved about Herodias' daughter to that degree, 
that the obnoxious viand was obliged to be removed; nor 
did she recover her stomach till she had gulped down a Re- 
storative, confected of Oak Apple, which the merry Twenty- 
Ninth of May always carries about with him for that purpose. 



200 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

The King's health ^ being called for after this, a notable 
dispute arose between the Twelfth of August (a zealous old 
Whig gentlewoman) and the Twenty-Third of April (a new- 
fangled lady of the Tory stamp), as to which of them should 
have the honor to propose it. August grew hot upon the 
matter, affirming time out of mind the prescriptive right to 
have lain with her, till her rival had basely supplanted her; 
whom she represented as little better than a ke'pt mistress, 
who went about in fine clothes, while she (the legitimate 
Birthday) had scarcely a rag, etc. 

April Fool, being made mediator, confirmed the right, 
in the strongest form of words, to the appellant, but de- 
cided for peace' sake that the exercise of it should remain 
with the present possessor. At the same time, he slyly 
rounded the first lady in the ear, that an action might he 
against the Crown for hi-geny. 

It beginning to grow a little duskish. Candlemas lustily 
bawled out for lights, which was opposed by all the Days, 
who protested against burning daylight. Then fair water 
was handed round in silver ewers, and the same lady was 
observed to take an unusual time in Washing herself. 

May Day, with that sweetness which is peculiar to her, 
in a neat speech proposing the health of the founder, crowned 
her goblet (and by her example the rest of the company) 
with garlands. This being done, the lordly New Year, from 
the upper end of the table, in a cordial but somewhat lofty 
tone, returned thanks. He felt proud on an occasion of 
meeting so many of his worthy father's late tenants, promised 
to improve their farms, and at the same time to abate (if 
anything was found unreasonable) in their rents. 

At the mention of this, the four Quarter Days involuntarily 
looked at each other, and smiled ; April Fool whistled to an 
old tune of ''New Brooms;" ^ and a surly old rebel at the 
farther end of the table (who was discovered to be no other 
than the Fifth of November) muttered out, distinctly enough 
to be heard by the whole company, words to this effect — 

* King George IV. [Lamb's note.] 

2 The old proverb reads, "A new broom sweeps clean." 



THE NEW year's COMING OF AGE 201 

that "when the old one is gone, he is a fool that looks for a 
better." Which rudeness of his, the guests resenting, unani- 
mously voted his expulsion; and the malcontent was thrust 
out neck and heels into the cellar, as the properest place for 
such a boutefeu^ and firebrand as he had shown himself to be. 

Order being restored — the young lord (who, to say truth, 
had been a little ruffled, and put beside his oratory) in as 
few and yet as obliging words as possible, assured them of 
entire welcome ; and, with a graceful turn, singling out poor 
Twenty-Ninth of February, that had sate all this while mum- 
chance at the side-board, begged to couple his health with 
that of the good company before him — which he drank 
accordingly; observing that he had not seen his honest face 
any time these four years — with a number of endearing 
expressions besides. At the same time removing the solitary 
Day from the forlorn seat which had been assigned him, he 
stationed him at his own board, somewhere between the 
Greek Calends and Latter Lammas. 

Ash Wednesday, being now called upon for a song, with 
his eyes fast stuck in his head, and as well as the Canary 
he had swallowed would give him leave, struck up a Carol, 
which Christmas Day had taught him for the nonce; and 
was followed by the latter, who gave "Miserere" in fine style, 
hitting off the mumping notes and lengthened drawl of Old 
Mortification with infinite humor. April Fool swore they 
had exchanged conditions; but Good Friday was observed 
to look extremely grave ; and Sunday held her fan before her 
face that she might not be seen to smile. 

Shrove-tide, Lord Mayor's Day, and April Fool, next 
joined in a glee — 

Which is the properest day to drink ? ^ 
in which all the Days chiming in, made a merry burden, 

^ Incendiary. 

2 From the old song, 

"Which is the properest day to drink? 
Saturday ? Sunday ? Monday ? 
Every day in the week I think, 

Why should I name but one day ! " 



202 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

They next fell to quibbles and conundrums. The ques- 
tion being proposed, who had the greatest number of follow- 
ers — the Quarter Days said, there could be no question as to 
that; for they had all the creditors in the world dogging 
their heels. But April Fool gave it in favor of the Forty 
Days before Easter; because the debtors in all cases out- 
numbered the creditors, and they kept Lent all the year. 

All this while Valentine's Day kept courting pretty May, 
who sate next him, slipping amorous billets-doux under the 
table, till the Dog Days (who are naturally of a warm con- 
stitution) began to be jealous, and to bark and rage ex- 
ceedingly. April Fool, who likes a bit of sport above meas- 
ure, and had some pretensions to the lady besides, as being 
but a cousin once removed, — clapped and halloo 'd them on; 
and as fast as their indignation cooled, those mad wags, the 
Ember Days, were at it with their bellows, to blow it into a 
flame ; and all was in a ferment, till old Madam Septuagesima 
(who boasts herself the Mother of the Days) wisely diverted the 
conversation with a tedious tale of the lovers which she could 
reckon when she was young, and of one Master Rogation 
Day in particular, who was for ever putting the question to 
her; but she kept him at a distance, as the chronicle would 
tell — by which I apprehend she meant the Almanack. 
Then she rambled on to the Days that were gone, the good old 
Days, and so to the Days before the Flood — which plainly 
showed her old head to be little better than crazed and doited. 

Day being ended, the Days called for their cloaks and 
greatcoats, and took their leave. Lord Mayor's Day went 
off in a Mist, as usual ; Shortest Day in a deep black Fog, that 
wrapt the little gentleman all round like a hedge-hog. Two 
Vigils — so watchmen are called in heaven — saw Christmas 
Day safe home — they had been used to the business before. 
Another Vigil — a stout, sturdy patrole, called the Eve of 
St. Christopher — seeing Ash Wednesday in a condition little 
better than he should be — e'en whipt him over his shoulders, 
pick-a-back fashion, and Old Mortification went floating 
home singing — 

On the bat's back I do fly, 



OLD CHINA 203 

and a number of old snatches besides, between drunk and 
sober ; but very few Aves or Penitentiaries (you may believe 
me) were among them. Longest Day set off westward in 
beautiful crimson and gold — the rest, some in one fashion, 
some in another; but Valentine and pretty May took their 
departure together in one of the prettiest silvery twilights 
a Lover's Day could wish to set in. 



OLD CHINA 

I HAVE an almost feminine partiality for old china. When 
I go to see any great house, I inquire for the china-closet, 
and next for the picture gallery. I cannot defend the order 
of preference but by saying that we have all some taste or 
other, of too ancient a date to admit of our remembering 
distinctly that it was an acquired one. I can call to mind 
the first play, and the first exhibition, that I was taken to; 
but I am not conscious of a time when china jars and saucers 
were introduced into my imagination. 

I had no repugnance then — why should I now have ? 
— to those little, lawless, azure-tinctured grotesques, that, 
under the notion of men and women, float about, uncir- 
cumscribed by any element, in that world before perspec- 
tive — a china tea-cup. 

I like to see my old friends — whom distance cannot 
diminish — figuring up in the air (so they appear to our 
optics), yet on terra Jirma^ still — for so we must in courtesy 
interpret that speck of deeper blue, which the decorous artist, 
to prevent absurdity, had made to spring up beneath their 
sandals. 

I love the men with women's faces, and the women, if 
possible, with still more womanish expressions. 

Here is a young and courtly Mandarin, handing tea to 
a lady from a salver — two miles off. See how distance 
seems to set off respect ! And here the same lady, or another 

^ The earth. 



204 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

— for likeness is identity on tea-cups — is stepping into a 
little fairy boat, moored on the hither side of this calm 
garden river, with a dainty mincing foot, which in a right 
angle of incidence (as angles go in our world) must infallibly 
land her in the midst of a flowery mead — a furlong off on 
the other side of the same strange stream ! 

Farther on — if far or near can be predicated of their 
world — see horses, trees, pagodas, dancing the hays. 

Here — a cow and rabbit couchant, and coextensive — 
so objects show, seen through the lucid atmosphere of fine 
Cathay. 

I was pointing out to my cousin last evening, over our 
Hyson (which we are old-fashioned enough to drink un- 
mixed still of an afternoon), some of these speciosa mi- 
racula ^ upon a set of extraordinary old blue china (a recent 
purchase) which we were now for the first time using; and 
could not help remarking, how favorable circumstances 
had been to us of late years, that we could afford to please 
the eye sometimes with trifles of this sort — when a passing 
sentiment seemed to overshade the brows of my companion. 
I am quick at detecting these summer clouds in Bridget. 

" I wish the good old times would come again, ^' she said, 
"when we were not quite so rich. I do not mean that I 
want to be poor ; but there was a middle state " — so she 
was pleased to ramble on, — "in which I am sure we were 
a great deal happier. A purchase is but a purchase, now 
that you have money enough and to spare. Formerly it 
used to be a triumph. When^ we coveted a cheap luxury 
(and, O ! how much ado I had to get you to consent in those 
times !) — we were used to have a debate two or three days 
before, and to weigh the for and against, and think what we 
might spare it out of, and what saving we could hit upon, 
that should be an equivalent. A thing was worth buying 
then, when we felt the money that we paid for it. 

"Do you remember the brown suit, which you made 
to hang upon you, till all your friends cried shame upon 
you, it grew so threadbare — and all because of that folia 

* Beautiful wonders. 



OLD CHINA 205 

Beaumont and Fletcher, which you dragged home late at 
night from Barker's in Co vent Garden? Do you remem- 
ber how we eyed it for weeks before we could make up 
our minds to the purchase, and had not come to a deter- 
mination till it was near ten o'clock of the Saturday night, 
when you set off from Islington, fearing you should be too 
late — and when the old bookseller with some grumbling 
opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was 
setting bedwards) lighted out the relic from his dusty treas- 
ures — and when you lugged it home, wishing it were twice 
as cumbersome — and when you presented it to me — and 
when we were exploring the perfectness of it (collating, you 
called it) — and while I was repairing some of the loose leaves 
with paste, which your impatience would not suffer to be 
left till day-break — was there no pleasure in being a poor 
man ? or can those neat black clothes which you wear now, 
and are so careful to keep brushed, since we have become 
rich and finical — give you half the honest vanity with which 
you flaunted it about in that overworn suit — your old cor- 
beau ^ — for four or five weeks longer than you should have 
done, to pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of fif- 
teen — or sixteen shillings was it ? — a great affair we thought 
it then — which you had lavished on the old folio. Now 
you can afford to buy any book that pleases you, but I do 
not see that you ever bring me home any nice old purchases 
now. 

"When you came home with twenty apologies for laying 
out a less number of shillings upon that print after Lionardo, 
which we christened the 'Lady Blanch;' when you looked 
at the purchase, and thought of the money — and thought 
of the money, and looked again at the picture — was there 
no pleasure in being a poor man? Now, you have nothing 
to do but to walk into Colnaghi's, and buy a wilderness of 
Lionardos. Yet do you ? 

''Then, do you remember our pleasant walks to Enfield, 
and Potter's Bar, and Waltham, when we had a holiday — 
holidays and all other fun are gone, now we are rich — and 

^ French for raven; hence, "your old black coat." 



206 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 



1 



the little hand-basket in which I used to deposit our day's 
fare of savory cold lamb and salad — and how you would 
pry about at noon-tide for some decent house, where we might 
go in and produce our store — only paying for the ale that 
you must call for — and speculate upon the looks of the land- 
lady, and whether she was likely to allow us a tablecloth — 
and wish for such another honest hostess as Izaak Walton 
has described many a one on the pleasant banks of the Lea, 
when he went a-fishing — and sometimes they would prove 
obliging enough, and sometimes they would look grudg- 
ingly upon us — but we had cheerful looks still for one 
another, and would eat our plain food savorily, scarcely 
grudging Piscator his Trout Hall ? Now — when we go out 
a day's pleasuring, which is seldom, moreover, we ride part 
of the way, and go into a fine inn, and order the best of din- 
ners, never debating the expense — which, after all, never 
has half the relish of those chance country snaps, when we 
were at the mercy of uncertain usage, and a precarious 
welcome. 

"You are too proud to see a play anywhere now but in 
the pit. Do you remember where it was we used to sit, 
when we saw the Battle of Hexham, and the Surrender of 
Calais, and Bannister and Mrs. Bland in the Children in the 
Wood — when we squeezed out our shillings apiece to sit 
three or four times in a season in the one-shilling gallery — 
where you felt all the time that you ought not to have brought 
me — and more strongly I felt obligation to you for having 
brought me — and the pleasure was the better for a little 
shame — and when the curtain drew up, what cared we for 
our place in the house, or what mattered it where we were 
sitting, when our thoughts were with Rosalind in Arden, 
or with Viola at the Court of Illyria ? You used to say that 
the Gallery was the best place of all for enjoying a play 
socially — that the relish of such exhibitions must be in 
proportion to the infrequency of going — that the company 
we met there, not being in general readers of plays, were 
obliged to attend the more, and did attend, to what was go- 
ing on, on the stage — because a word lost would have been 



OLD CHINA 207: 

a chasm, which it was impossible for them to fill up. With 
such reflections we consoled our pride then — and I appeal 
to you whether, as a woman, I met generally with less atten- 
tion and accommodation than I have done since in more 
expensive situations in the house? The getting in, indeed, 
and the crowding up those inconvenient staircases, was bad 
enough — but there was still a law of civility to woman 
recognized to quite as great an extent as we ever found in 
the other passages — and how a little difficulty overcome 
heightened the snug seat and the play, afterwards! Now 
we can only pay our money and walk in. You cannot see, 
you say, in the galleries now. I am sure we saw, and heard 
too, well enough then — but sight, and all, I think, is gone 
with our poverty. 

"There was pleasure in eating strawberries, before they 
became quite common — in the first dish of peas, while they 
were yet dear — to have them for a nice supper, a treat. 
What treat can we have now ? If we were to treat ourselves 
now — that is, to have dainties a little above our means, 
it would be selfish and wicked. It is the very little more 
that we allow ourselves beyond what the actual poor can 
get at, that makes what I call a treat — when two people, 
living together as we have done, now and then indulge them- 
selves in a cheap luxury, which both like ; while each apolo- 
gizes, and is wiUing to take both halves of the blame to his 
single share. I see no harm in people making much of 
themselves, in that sense of the word. It may give them a 
hint how to make much of others. But now — what I mean 
by the word — we never do make much of ourselves. None 
but the poor can do it. I do not mean the veriest poor of 
all, but persons as we were, just above, poverty. 

"I know what you were going to say, that it is mighty 
pleasant at the end of the year to make all meet, — and much 
ado we used to have every Thirty-first Night of December 
to account for our exceedings — many a long face did you 
make over your puzzled accounts, and in contriving to make 
it out how we had spent so much — or that we had not spent 
so much — or that it was impossible we should spend so much 



208 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

next year — and still we found our slender capital decreas- 
ing — but then, — betwixt ways, and projects, and com- 
promises of one sort or another, and talk of curtailing this 
charge, and doing without that for the future — and the 
hope that youth brings, and laughing spirits (in which you 
were never poor till now), we pocketed up our loss, and in 
conclusion, with ' lusty brimmers ' ^ (as you used to quote 
it out of hearty cheerful Mr. Cotton, as you called him), we 
used to welcome in the 'coming guest.' Now we have no 
reckoning at all at the end of the old year — no flattering 
promises about the new year doing better for us." 

Bridget is so sparing of her speech on most occasions, that 
when she gets into a rhetorical vein, I am careful how I 
interrupt it. I could not help, however, smiling at the 
phantom of wealth which her dear imagination had conjured 

up out of a clear income of poor hundred pounds a 

year. ''It is true we were happier when we were poorer, 
but we were also younger, my cousin. I am afraid we must 
put up with the excess, for if we were to shake the superflux 
into the sea, we should not much mend ourselves. That we 
had much to struggle with, as we grew up together, we have 
reason to be most thankful. It strengthened and knit our 
compact closer. We could never have been what we have 
been to each other, if we had always had the sufficiency 
which you now complain of. The resisting power — those 
natural dilations of the youthful spirit, which circumstances 
cannot straiten — with us are long since passed away. 
Competence to age is supplementary youth, a sorry supple- 
ment indeed, but I fear the best that is to be had. We 
must ride, where we formerly walked: live better and lie 
softer — and shall be wise to do so — than we had means 
to do in those good old days you speak of. Yet could those 
days return — could you and I once more walk our thirty 
miles a day — could Bannister and Mrs. Bland again be 
young, and you and I be young to see them — could the good 

1 Charles Cotton's "The New Year," 

" Then let us welcome the new guest 
With lusty brimmers of the best." 



POPULAR FALLACIES 209 

old one-shilling gallery days return — they are dreams, my 
cousin, now — but could you and I at this moment, instead 
of this quiet argument, by our well-carpeted fireside, sitting 
on this luxurious sofa — be once more strugghng up those 
inconvenient staircases, pushed about, and squeezed, and 
elbowed by the poorest rabble of poor gallery scramblers — 
could I once more hear those anxious shrieks of yours — 
and the delicious Thank God, we are safe, which always fol- 
lowed when the topmost stair, conquered, let in the first 
fight of the whole cheerful theatre down beneath us — I 
know not the fathom line that ever touched a descent so 
deep as I would be willing to bury more wealth in than 

Croesus had, or the great Jew R is supposed to have, to 

purchase it. And now do just look at that merry little 
Chinese waiter holding an umbreUa, big enough for a bed- 
tester, over the head of that pretty insipid half Madonna-ish 
chit of a lady in that very blue summer-house." 



POPULAR FALLACIES 



III. — THAT A MAN MUST NOT LAUGH AT HIS OWN JEST 

The severest exaction surely ever invented upon the self- 
denial of poor human nature ! This is to expect a gentle- 
man to give a treat without partaking of it ; to sit esurient 
at his own table, and commend the flavor of his venison 
upon the absurd strength of his never touching it himself. 
On the contrary, we love to see a wag taste his own joke to 
his party; to watch a quirk or a merry conceit flickering 
upon the lips some seconds before the tongue is delivered of 
it. If it be good, fresh, and racy — begotten of the occa- 
sion ; if he that utters it never thought it before, he is natu- 
rally the first to be tickled with it, and any suppression of 
such complacence we hold to be churlish and insulting. 



210 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

What does it seem to imply but that your company is weak 
or foohsh enough to be moved by an image or a fancy, that 
shall stir you not at all, or but faintly? This is exactly 
the humor of the fine gentleman in Mandeville, who, while 
he dazzles his guests with the display of some costly toy, 
affects himself to "see nothing considerable in it." 



V. — THAT THE POOR COPY THE VICES OF THE RICH 

A SMOOTH text to the latter; and, preached from the 
pulpit, is sure of a docile audience from the pews lined with 
satin. It is twice sitting upon velvet to a foolish squire 
to be told that he — and not perverse nature, as the homilies 
would make us imagine, is the true cause of all the irregu- 
larities in his parish. This is striking at the root of free-will 
indeed, and denying the originality of sin in any sense. But 
men are not such implicit sheep as this comes to. If the 
abstinence from evil on the part of the upper classes is to 
derive itself from no higher principle than the apprehension 
of setting ill patterns to the lower, we beg leave to discharge 
them from all squeamishness on that score : they may even 
take their fill of pleasures, where they can find them. The 
Genius of Poverty, hampered and straitened as it is, is not 
so barren of invention but it can trade upon the staple of its 
own vice, without drawing upon their capital. The poor 
are not quite such servile imitators as they take them for. 
Some of them are very clever artists in their way. Here 
and there, we find an original. Who taught the poor to 
steal — to pilfer ? They did not go to the great for school- 
masters in these faculties, surely. It is well if in some vices 
they allow us to be — no copyists. In no other sense is it 
true that the poor copy them, than as servants may be said 
to take after their masters and mistresses, when they succeed 
to their reversionary cold meats. If the master, from indis- 



POPULAR FALLACIES 211 

position, or some other cause, neglect his food, the servant 
dines notwithstanding. 

''O, but (some will say) the force of example is great." 
We knew a lady who was so scrupulous on this head, that 
she would put up with the calls of the most impertinent 
visitor, rather than let her servant say she was not at home, 
for fear of teaching her maid to tell an untruth; and this in 
the very face of the fact, which she knew well enough, that 
the wench was one of the greatest liars upon the earth with- 
out teaching; so much so, that her mistress possibly never 
heard two words of consecutive truth from her in her hfe. 
But nature must go for nothing; example must be every- 
thing. This har in grain, who never opened her mouth with- 
out a he, must be guarded against a remote inference, 
which she (pretty casuist !) might possibly draw from a form 
of words — literally false, but essentially deceiving no one — 
that under some circumstances a fib might not be so ex- 
ceedingly sinful — a fiction, too, not at all in her own way, 
or one that she could be suspected of adopting, for few 
servant-wenches care to be denied to visitors. 

This word example reminds us of another fine word which 
is in use upon these occasions — encouragement. ''People 
in our sphere must not be thought to give encouragement to 
such proceedings." To such a frantic height is this principle 
capable of being carried, that we have known individuals 
who have thought it within the scope of their influence to 
sanction despair, and give eclat to — suicide. A domestic 
in the family of a county member lately deceased, from love, 
or some unknown cause, cut his throat, but not successfully. 
The poor fellow was otherwise much loved and respected; 
and great interest was used in his behalf, upon his recovery,' 
that he might be permitted to retain his place ; his word being 
first pledged, not without some substantial sponsors to prom- 
ise for him, that the hke should never happen again. His 
master was inclinable to keep him, but his mistress thought 
otherwise; and John in the end was dismissed, her ladyship 
declaring that she "could not think of encouraging any such 
doings in the county." 



212 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 



VI. — THAT ENOUGH IS AS GOOD AS A FEAST 

Not a man, woman, or child, in ten miles round Guild- 
hall, who really believes this saying. The inventor of it 
did not believe it himself. It was made in revenge by 
somebody, who was disappointed of a regale. It is a vile 
cold-scrag-of-mutton sophism ; a lie palmed upon the palate, 
which knows better things. If nothing else could be said for 
a feast, this is sufficient — that from the superflux there is 
usually something left for the next day. Morally interpreted, 
it belongs to a class of proverbs which have a tendency to 
make us undervalue money. Of this cast are those notable 
observations, that money is not health; riches cannot pur- 
chase everything : the metaphor which makes gold to be 
mere muck, with the morality which traces fine clothing to 
the sheep's back, and denounces pearl as the unhandsome 
excretion of an oyster. Hence, too, the phrase which im- 
putes dirt to acres — a sophistry so barefaced that even the 
literal sense of it is true only in a wet season. This, and 
abundance of similar sage saws assuming to inculcate con- 
tent, we verily believe to have been the invention of some 
cunning borrower, who had designs upon the purse of his 
wealthier neighbor, which he could only hope to carry by 
force of these verbal jugglings. Translate any one of these 
sayings out of the artful metonymy which envelopes it, and 
the trick is apparent. Goodly legs and shoulders of mut- 
ton, exhilarating cordials, books, pictures, the opportunities 
of seeing foreign countries, independence, heart's ease, a 
man's own time to himself, are not muck — however we may 
be pleased to scandalize with that appellation the faithful 
metal that provides them for us. . 



IX. — that the worst puns are the best 

If by worst be only meant the most far-fetched and start- 
ling, we agree to it. A pun is not bound by the laws which 
limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather 



POPULAR FALLACIES 213 

to tickle the intellect. It is an antic which does not stand 
upon manners, but comes bounding into the presence, and 
does not show the less comic for being dragged in sometimes 
by the head and shoulders. What though it limp a little, or 
prove defective in one leg ? — all the better. A pun may 
easily be too curious and artificial. Who has not at one 
time or other been at a party of professors (himself perhaps 
an old offender in that line), where, after ringing a round of 
the most ingenious conceits, every man contributing his shot, 
and some there the most expert shooters of the day ; after 
making a poor word run the gauntlet till it is ready to drop ; 
after hunting and winding it through all the possible ambages 
of similar sounds ; after squeezing, and hauling, and tugging 
at it, till the very milk of it will not yield a drop further, — 
suddenly some obscure, unthought-of fellow in a corner, 
who was never 'prentice to the trade, whom the company 
for very pity passed over, as we do by a known poor man 
when a money-subscription is going round, no one calling 
upon him for his quota — has all at once come out with some- 
thing so whimsical, yet so pertinent ; so brazen in its preten- 
sions, yet so impossible to be denied; so exquisitely good, 
and so deplorably bad, at the same time, — that it has proved 
a Robin Hood's shot ; anything ulterior to that is despaired 
of; and the party breaks up, unanimously voting it to be 
the very worst (that is, best) pun of the evening. This 
species of wit is the better for not being perfect in all its 
parts. What it gains in completeness, it loses in natural- 
ness. The more exactly it satisfies the critical, the less 
hold it has upon some other faculties. The puns which 
are most entertaining are those which will least bear an 
analysis. Of this kind is the following, recorded, with a 
sort of stigma, in one of Swift's Miscellanies. ' 

An Oxford scholar, meeting a porter who was carrying 
a hare through the streets, accosts him with this extraordi- 
nary question: "Prithee, friend, is that thy own hare or a 
wig?" 

There is no excusing this, and no resisting it. A man 
might blur ten sides of paper in attempting a defence of 



214 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

it against a critic who should be laughter-proof. The 
quibble in itself is not considerable. It is only a new turn 
given, by a little false pronunciation, to a very common though 
not very courteous inquiry. Put by one gentleman to another 
at a dinner-party, it would have been vapid ; to the mistress 
of the house, it would have shown much less wit than rude- 
ness. We must take in the totality of time, place, and per- 
son; the pert look of the inquiring scholar, the desponding 
looks of the puzzled porter : the one stopping at leisure, the 
other hurrying on with his burden; the innocent though 
rather abrupt tendency of the first member of the question, 
with the utter and inextricable irrelevancy of the second; 
the place — a public street, not favorable to frivolous in- 
vestigations ; the affrontive quality of the primitive inquiry 
(the common question) invidiously transferred to the de- 
rivative (the new turn given to it) in the implied satire; 
namely, that few of that tribe are expected to eat of the 
good things which they carry, they being in most countries 
considered rather as the temporary trustees than owners of 
such dainties, — which the fellow was beginning to under- 
stand; but then the wig again comes in, and he can make 
nothing of it ; all put together constitute a picture : Hogarth 
could have made it intelligible on canvas. 

Yet nine out of ten critics will pronounce this a very 
bad pun, because of the defectiveness in the concluding 
member, which is its very beauty, and constitutes the sur- 
prise. The same persons shall cry up for admirable the cold 
quibble from Vergil about the broken Cremona, because it is 
made out in all its parts, and leaves nothing to the imagina- 
tion. We venture to call it cold ; because, of thousands who 
have admired it, it would be difficult to find one who has 
heartily chuckled at it. As appealing to the judgment merely 
(setting the risible faculty aside), we must pronounce it a 
monument of curious felicity. But as some stories are said 
to be too good to be true, it may with equal truth be asserted 
of this bi-verbal allusion, that it is too good to be natural. 
One cannot help suspecting that the incident was invented 
to fit the line. It would have been better had it been less 



POPULAR FALLACIES 215 

perfect. Like some Vergilian hemistichs, it has suffered by 
filling up. The nimium Vicina ^ was enough in conscience ; 
the CremonoB ^ afterwards loads it. It is, in fact, a double 
pun; and we have always observed that a superfoetation in 
this sort of wit is dangerous. When a man has said a good 
thing, it is seldom politic to follow it up. We do not care to 
be cheated a second time ; or, perhaps, the mind of man (with 
reverence be it spoken) is not capacious enough to lodge two 
puns at a time. The impression, to be forcible, must be 
simultaneous and undivided. 



XI. — THAT WE MUST NOT LOOK A GIFT HORSE IN 
THE MOUTH 

Nor a lady's age in the parish register. We hope we 
have more delicacy than to do either ; but some faces spare 
us the trouble of these dental inquiries. And what if the 
beast, which my friend would force upon my acceptance, 
prove, upon the face of it, a sorry Rosinante, a lean, ill- 
favored jade, whom no gentleman could think of setting up 
in his ^tables? Must I, rather than not be obliged to my 
friend, make her a companion to Eclipse or Lightfoot? A 
horse-giver, no more than a horse-seller, has a right to palm 
his spavined article upon us for good ware. An equivalent 
is expected in either case; and, with my own good-will, I 
would no more be cheated out of my thanks than out of my 
money. Some people have a knack of putting upon you 
gifts of no real value, to engage you to substantial gratitude. 
We thank them for nothing. Our friend Mitis carries this 

^ Too near a neighbor. 

2 Swift on seeing a lady's mantua (a mantle and also the name 
of Vergil's birthplace) knock over a Cremona violin (Cremona was 
the home of several violin makers), quoted a line from Vergil's 
Eclogues, ix. 28. 

Mantua vce miserce nimium vicina Cremonce. 
(Mantua, alas! too near unhappy Cremona.) 



216 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELI A 

humor of never refusing a present to the very point of 
absurdity — if it were possible to couple the ridiculous with 
so much mistaken delicacy and real good-nature. Not an 
apartment in his fine house (and he has a true taste in house- 
hold decorations), but is stuffed up with some preposterous 
print or mirror — the worst adapted to his panels that may 
be — the presents of his friends that know his weakness ; 
while his noble Vandykes are displaced to make room for 
a set of daubs, the work of some wretched artist of his ac- 
quaintance, who, having had them returned upon his hands 
for bad likenesses, finds his account in bestowing them here 
gratis. The good creature has not the heart to mortify the 
painter at the expense of an honest refusal. It is pleasant 
(if it did not vex one at the same time) to see him sitting 
in his dining parlor, surrounded with obscure aunts and 
cousins to God knows whom, while the true Lady Marys 
and Lady Bettys of his own honorable family, in favor to 
these adopted frights, are consigned to the staircase and the 
lumber-room. In like manner, his goodly shelves are one 
by one stripped of his favorite old authors, to give place to 
a collection of presentation copies — the flour and bran of 
modern poetry. A presentation copy, Reader — if haply 
you are yet innocent of such favors — is a copy of a book 
which does not sell, sent you by the author, with his foolish 
autograph at the beginning of it; for which, if a stranger, 
he only demands your friendship ; if a brother author, he 
expects from you a book of yours, which does sell, in return. 
We can speak to experience, having by us a tolerable assort- 
ment of these gift-horses. Not to ride a metaphor to death — 
we are willing to acknowledge that in some gifts there is 
sense. A duplicate out of a friend's library (where he has 
more than one copy of a rare author) is intelligible. There 
are favors, short of the pecuniary — a thing not fit to be 
hinted at among gentlemen — which confer as much grace 
upon the acceptor as the offerer ; the kind, we confess, which 
is most to our palate, is of those little conciliatory missives, 
which for their vehicle generally choose a hamper — little 
odd presents of game, fruit, perhaps wine — though it is 



POPULAR FALLACIES 217 

essential to the delicacy of the latter, that it be home-made. 
We love to have our friend in the country sitting thus at our 
table by proxy; to apprehend his presence (though a hun- 
dred miles may be between us) by a turkey, whose goodly 
aspect reflects to us his ''plump corpusculum ; " to taste him 
in grouse or woodcock ; to feel him gliding down in the toast 
peculiar to the latter; to concorporate him in a slice of 
Canterbury brawn. This is indeed to have him within our- 
selves; to know him intimately: such participation is me- 
thinks unitive, as the old theologians phrase it. For these 
considerations we should be sorry if certain restrictive regu- 
lations, which are thought to bear hard upon the peasantry 
of this country, were entirely done away with. A hare, as 
the law now stands, makes many friends. Caius conciliates 
Titius (knowing his gout ^) with a leash of partridges. Titius 
(suspecting his partiality for them) passes them to Lucius; 
who, in his turn, preferring his friend's relish to his own, 
makes them over to Marcius; till in their ever- widening 
progress, and round of unconscious circummigration, they 
distribute the seeds of harmony over half a parish. We are 
well-disposed to this kind of sensible remembrances ; and are 
the less apt to be taken by those little airy tokens — impal- 
pable to the palate — which, under the names of rings, lock- 
ets, keepsakes, amuse some people's fancy mightily. We 
could never away with these indigestible trifles. They are 
the very kickshaws and foppery of friendship. 



XII. — THAT HOME IS HOME THOUGH IT IS NEVER 
SO HOMELY 

Homes there are, we are sure, that are no homes ; the home 
of the very poor man, and another which we shall speak to 
presently. Crowded places of cheap entertainment, and the 
benches of alehouses, if they could speak, might bear mourn- 
ful testimony to the first. To them the very poor man 

1 Taste. 



218 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

resorts for an image of the home which he cannot find at 
home. For a starved grate, and a scanty firing, that is not 
enough to keep ahve the natural heat in the fingers of so 
many shivering children with their mother, he finds in the 
depths of winter always a blazing hearth, and a hob to warm 
his pittance of beer by. Instead of the clamors of a wife, 
made gaunt by famishing, he meets with a cheerful attend- 
ance beyond the merits of the trifle which he can afford to 
spend. He has companions which his home denies him, for 
the very poor man has no visitors. He can look into the 
goings on of the world, and speak a little to politics. At 
home there are no politics stirring, but the domestic. All 
interest, real or imaginary, all topics that should expand 
the mind of man, and connect him to a sympathy with gen- 
eral existence, are crushed in the absorbing consideration of 
food to be obtained for the family. Beyond the price of 
bread, news is senseless and impertinent. At home there is 
no larder. Here there is at least a show of plenty; and 
while he cooks his lean scrap of butcher's meat before the 
common bars, or munches his humbler cold viands, his 
relishing bread and cheese with an onion, in a corner, where 
no one reflects upon his poverty, he has a sight of the sub- 
stantial joint providing for the landlord and his family. He 
takes an interest in the dressing of it; and while he assists 
in removing the trivet from the fire, he feels that there is 
such a thing as beef and cabbage, which he was beginning to 
forget at home. All this while he deserts his wife and children. 
But what wife, and what children ! Prosperous men, who 
object to this desertion, image to themselves some clean 
contented family like that which they go home to. But 
look at the countenance of the poor wives who follow and 
persecute their good-man to the door of the public-house, 
which he is about to enter, when something like shame 
would restrain him, if stronger misery did not induce him 
to pass the threshold. That face, ground by want, in which 
every cheerful, every conversable lineament has been long 
effaced by misery, — is that a face to stay at home with ? 
is it more a woman, or a wild cat ? alas ! it is the face of the 



I 



POPULAR FALLACIES 219 

wife of his youth, that once smiled upon him. It can smile 
no longer. What comforts can it share ? what burdens can 
it lighten ? Oh, 'tis a fine thing to talk of the humble meal 
shared together! But what if there be no bread in the 
cupboard? The innocent prattle of his children takes out 
the sting of a man's poverty. But the children of the very 
poor do not prattle. It is none of the least frightful features 
in that condition, that there is no childishness in its dwellings. 
Poor people, said a sensible old nurse to us once, do not 
bring up their children ; they drag them up. 

The little careless darling of the wealthier nursery, in 
their hovel is transformed betimes into a premature re- 
flecting person. No one has time to dandle it, no one thinks 
it worth while to coax it, to soothe it, to toss it up and down, 
to humor it. There is none to kiss away its tears. If it 
cries, it can only be beaten. It has been prettily said that 
"a. babe is fed with milk and praise." But the aliment 
of this poor babe was thin, unnourishing ; the return to its 
little baby tricks, and efforts to engage attention, bitter 
ceaseless objurgation. It never had a toy, or knew what a 
coral meant. It grew up without the lullaby of nurses, 
it was a stranger to the patient fondle, the hushing caress, 
the attracting novelty, the costlier plaything, or the cheaper 
off-hand contrivance to divert the child; the prattled non- 
sense (best sense to it), the wise impertinences, the whole- 
some lies, the apt story interposed, that puts a stop to 
present sufferings, and awakens the passion of young 
wonder. It was never sung to — no one ever told to it a 
tale of the nursery. It was dragged up, to live or to die as 
it happened. It had no young dreams. It broke at once 
into the iron realities of life. A child exists not for the 
very poor as any object of dalliance ; it is only another mouth 
to be fed, a pair of little hands to be betimes inured to 
labor. It is the rival, till it can be the co-operator, for 
food with the parent. It is never his mirth, his diversion, 
his solace : it never makes him young again, with recalling 
his young times. The children of the very poor have no 
young times. It makes the very heart to bleed to over- 



220 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

hear the casual street-talk between a poor woman and 
her little girl, a woman of the better sort of poor, in a condi- 
tion rather above the squalid beings which we have been 
contemplating. It is not of toys, of nursery books, of 
summer holidays (fitting that age) ; of the promised sight, 
or play; of praised sufficiency at school. It is of mangling 
and clear-starching, of the price of coals, or of potatoes'. 
The questions of the child, that should be the very out- 
pourings of curiosity in idleness, are marked with forecast 
and melancholy providence. It has come to be a woman, — 
before it was a child. It has learned to go to market; it 
chaffers, it haggles, it envies, it murmurs; it is knowing, 
acute, sharpened; it never prattles. Had we not reason 
to say that the home of the very poor is no home? 

There is yet another home, which we are constrained 
to deny to be one. It has a larder, which the home of 
the poor man wants; its fireside conveniences, of which 
the poor dream not. But with all this, it is no home. It 
is — the house of the man that is infested with many visitors. 
May we be branded for the veriest churl, if we deny our 
heart to the many noble-hearted friends that at times ex- 
change their dwelling for our poor roof ! It is not of guests 
that we complain, but of endless, purposeless visitants; 
droppers-in, as they are called. We sometimes wonder 
from what sky they fall. It is the very error of the position 
of our lodging; its horoscopy was ill calculated, being just 
situate in a medium — a plaguy suburban mid-space — 
fitted to catch idlers from town or country. We are older 
than we were, and age is easily put out of its way. We 
have fewer sands in our glass to reckon upon, and we cannot 
brook to see them drop in endlessly succeeding impertinences. 
At our time of life, to be alone sometimes is as needful as 
sleep. It is the refreshing sleep of the day. The growing 
infirmities of age manifest themselves in nothing more 
strongly than in an inveterate dislike of interruption. The 
thing which we are doing, we wish to be permitted to do. 
We have neither much knowledge nor devices; but there 
are fewer in the place to which we hasten. We are not 



POPULAR FALLACIES 221 

willingly put out of our way, even at a game of nine-pins. 
While youth was, we had vast reversions in time future; 
we are reduced to a present pittance, and obliged to econo^ 
mize in that article. We bleed away our moments now 
as hardly as our ducats. We cannot bear to have our 
thin wardrobe eaten and fretted into by moths. We are 
willing to barter our good time with a friend, who gives 
us in exchange his own. Herein is the distinction between 
the genuine guest and the visitant. This latter takes your 
good time, and gives you his bad in exchange. The guest 
is domestic to you as your good cat, or household bird; 
the visitant is your fly, that flaps in at your window and 
out again, leaving nothing but a sense of disturbance, and 
victuals spoiled. The inferior functions of life begin to 
move heavily. We cannot concoct our food with interrup- 
tions. Our chief meal, to be nutritive, must be solitary. 
With difficulty we can eat before a guest ; and never under- 
stood what the relish of public feasting meant. Meats 
have no sapor, nor digestion fair play, in a crowd. The 
unexpected coming in of a visitant stops the machine. There 
is a punctual generation who time their calls to the precise 
commencement of your dining-hour — not to eat — but to 
see you eat. Our knife and fork drop instinctively, and 
we feel that we have swallowed our latest morsel. Others 
again show their genius, as we have said, in knocking the 
moment you have just sat down to a book. They have a 
pecuHar compassionate sneer, with which they ''hope that 
they do not interrupt your studies." Though they flutter 
off the next moment, to carry their impertinences to the near- 
est student that they can call their friend, the tone of the 
book is spoiled ; we shut the leaves, and, with Dante's lovers, 
read no more that day. It were well if the effect of intru- 
sion were simply coextensive with its presence, but it mars 
all the good hours afterwards. These scratches in appear- 
ance leave an orifice that closes not hastily. "It is a pros- 
titution of the bravery of friendship," says worthy Bishop 
Taylor, 'Ho spend it upon impertinent people, who are, 
it may be, loads to their families, but can never ease my 



222 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

loads." This is the secret of their gaddings, their visits, 
and morning calls. They too have homes, which are — no 
homes. 



XIV. THAT WE SHOULD RISE WITH THE LARK 

At what precise minute that little airy musician doffs his 
night-gear, and prepares to tune up his unseasonable matins, 
we are not naturalist enough to determine. But for a 
mere human gentleman — that has no orchestra business 
to call him from his warm bed to such preposterous exercises 
— we take ten, or half after ten (eleven, of course, during 
this Christmas solstice) , to be the very earliest hour at which 
he can begin to think of abandoning his pillow. To think 
of it, we say; for to do it in earnest requires another 
half hour's good consideration. Not but there are pretty 
sun-risings, as we are told, and such like gawds, abroad in 
the world, in summer-time especially, some hours before 
what we have assigned; which a gentleman may see, 
as they say, only for getting up. But having been tempted 
once or twice, in earlier life, to assist at those ceremonies, we 
confess our curiosity abated. We are no longer ambitious 
of being the sun's courtiers, to attend at his morning levees. 
We hold the good hours of the dawn too sacred to waste 
them upon such observances; which have in them, besides, 
something Pagan and Persic. To say truth, we never 
anticipated our usual hour, or got up with the sun (as 'tis 
called), to go a journey, or upon a foolish whole day's pleasur- 
ing, but we suffered for it all the long hours after in listless- 
ness and headaches; Nature herself sufficiently declaring 
her sense of our presumption in aspiring to regulate our 
frail waking courses by the measures of that celestial and 
sleepless traveller. We deny not that there is something 
sprightly and vigorous, at the outset especially, in these 
break-of-day excursions. It is flattering to get the start 
of a lazy world; to conquer Death by proxy in his image. 



POPULAR FALLACIES 223 

But the seeds of sleep and mortality are in us; and we 
pay usually, in strange qualms before night falls, the penalty 
of the unnatural inversion. Therefore, while the busy 
part of mankind are fast huddling on their clothes, are 
already up and about their occupations, content to have 
swallowed their sleep by wholesale; we choose to linger 
a-bed and digest our dreams. It is the very time to re- 
combine the wandering images, which night in a confused 
mass presented; to snatch them from f orgetfulness ; to 
shape, and mould them. Some people have no good of their 
dreams. Like fast feeders, they gulp them too grossly, 
to taste them curiously. We love to chew the cud of a 
foregone vision; to collect the scattered rays of a brighter 
phantasm, or act over again, with firmer nerves, the sadder 
nocturnal tragedies; to drag into daylight a struggling 
and half- vanishing nightmare; to handle and examine 
the terrors, or the airy solaces. We have too much respect 
for these spiritual communications, to let them go so lightly. 
We are not so stupid, or so careless as that Imperial forgetter 
of his dreams, that we should need a seer to remind us of the 
form of them. They seem to us to have as much significance 
as our waking concerns ; or rather to import us more nearly, as 
more nearly we approach by years to the shadowy world, 
whither we are hastening. We have shaken hands with the 
world's business ; we have done with it ; we have discharged 
ourselves of it. Why should we get up ? we have neither suit 
to solicit, nor affairs to manage. The drama has shut in upon 
us at the fourth act. We have nothing here to expect, but 
in a short time a sick-bed, and a dismissal. We delight to 
anticipate death by such shadows as night affords. We are 
already half acquainted with ghosts. We were never much in 
the world. Disappointment early struck a dark veil between 
us and its dazzling illusions. Our spirits showed gray 
before our hairs. The mighty changes of the world already 
appear as but the vain stuff out of which dramas are com- 
posed. We have asked no more of life than what the mimic 
images in play-houses present us with. Even those types have 
waxed fainter, Qur clock appears to have struck, We are 



224 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

SUPERANNUATED. In this dearth of mudane satisfaction, 
we contract politic alliances with shadows. It is good to 
have friends at court. The abstracted media of dreams 
seem no ill introduction to that spiritual presence, upon 
which, in no long time, we expect to be thrown. We are 
trying to know a little of the usages of that colony; to 
learn the language and the faces we shall meet with there, 
that we may be the less awkward at our first coming among 
them. We willingly call a phantom our fellow, as knowing 
we shall soon be of their dark companionship. Therefore 
we cherish dreams. We try to spell in them the alphabet 
of the invisible world; and think we know already how it 
shall be with us. Those uncouth shapes which, while we 
clung to flesh and blood, affrighted us, have become familiar. 
We feel attenuated into their meagre essences, and have given 
the hand of half-way approach to incorporeal being. We 
once thought life to be something; but it has unaccountably 
fallen from us before its time. Therefore we choose to dally 
with visions. The sun has no purposes of ours to light us 
to. Why should we get up ? 

XV. THAT WE SHOULD LIE DOWN WITH THE LAMB 

We could never quite understand the philosophy of this 
arrangement, or the wisdom of our ancestors in sending 
us for instruction to these woolly bedfellows. A sheep, 
when it is dark, has nothing to do but to shut his silly eyes, 
and sleep if he can. Man found out long sixes. — Hail, 
candle-light ! without disparagement to sun or moon, the 
kindliest luminary of the three — if we may not rather 
style thee their radiant deputy, mild viceroy of the moon ! 
— We love to read, talk, sit silent, eat, drink, sleep, by 
candle-light. They are everybody's sun and moon. This 
is our peculiar and household planet. Wanting it, what 
savage unsocial nights must our ancestors have spent, 
wintering in caves and unillumined fastnesses ! They 
must have lain about and grumbled at one another in the 
dark. What repartees could have passed, when you must 



POPULAR FALLACIES 225 

have felt about for a smile, and handled a neighbor's cheek 
to be sure that he understood it? This accounts for the 
seriousness of the elder poetry. It has a sombre cast (try 
Hesiod or Ossian), derived from the tradition of those un- 
lantern'd nights. Jokes came in with candles. We wonder 
how they saw to pick up a pin, if they had any. How 
did they sup? what a melange of chance carving they must 
have made of it ? — here one had got a leg of a goat when 
he wanted a horse's shoulder — there another had dipped 
his scooped palm in a kid-skin of wild honey, when he medi- 
tated right mare's milk. There is neither good eating 
nor drinking in fresco. Who, even in these civilized times, 
has never experienced this, when at some economic table 
he has commenced dining after dusk, and waited for the 
flavor till the lights came ? The senses absolutely give 
and take reciprocally. Can you tell pork from veal in the 
dark? or distinguish Sherris from pure Malaga? Take 
away the candle from the smoking man ; by the glimmering 
of the left ashes, he knows that he is still smoking, but he 
knows it only by an inference ; till the restored light, coming 
in aid of the olfactories, reveals to both senses the full aroma. 
Then how he redoubles his puffs ! how he burnishes ! — There 
is absolutely no such thing as reading but by a candle. We 
have tried the affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens, 
and in sultry arbors; but it was labor thrown away. 
Those gay motes in the beam come about you, hovering 
and teasing, like so many coquettes, that will have you 
all to their self and are jealous of your abstractions. By 
the midnight taper, the writer digests his meditations. 
By the same light we must approach to their perusal, if 
we would catch the flame, the odor. It is a mockery, 
all that is reported of the influential Phoebus. No true 
poem ever owed its birth to the sun's light. They are 
abstracted works — 

Things that were born, when none but the still night, 
And his dumb candle, saw his pinching throes.^ 

^ Ben Jonson's Poetaster. 



226 THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA 

Marry, daylight — daylight might furnish the images, the 
crude material ; but for the fine shapings, the true turning 
and filing (as mine author hath it ^), they must be content 
to hold their inspiration of the candle. The mild internal 
light, that reveals them, like fires on the domestic hearth, 
goes out in the sunshine. Night and silence call out the 
starry fancies. Milton's Morning Hymn in Paradise,^ we 
would hold a good wager, was penned at midnight; and 
Taylor's rich description of a sunrise^ smells decidedly of 
the taper. Even ourself , in these our humbler lucubrations, 
tune our best-measured cadences (Prose has her cadences) 
not unfrequently to the charm of the drowsier watchman, 
"blessing the doors"; or the wild sweep of winds at mid- 
night. Even now a loftier speculation than we have yet 
attempted, courts our endeavors. We would indite some- 
thing about the Solar System. — Betty, bring the candles. 

^ Ben Jonson's To the Memory of Shakespeare, 

"Look how the father's face 
Lives in his issue ; even so the race 
Of Shakspeare's mind and manners brightly shines 
In his well-turned and true filed hues." 

2 Paradise Lost, v. 153. 

3 This description is in Taylor's Holy Dying, Chapter 1, sec. 3, 
The passage was a favorite with Lamb. 

". . . the life of a man comes upon him slowly and insensibty. 
But as when the sun approaches towards the gates of the morning, 
he first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits of 
darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls up the lark to matins, 
and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the eastern 
hills, thrusting out his golden horns, like those which decked the 
brow of Moses when he was forced to wear a veil because himself 
had seen the face of God; and still while a man tells the story, the 
sun gets up higher, till he shows a fair face and a full light, and then 
he shines a whole day, under a cloud often, and sometimes weeping 
great and little showers, and sets quickly; so is a man's reason and 
his life." 



CRITICAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTES 



The South-Sea House. London Magazine, August, 1820. 
(Pages 1-9.) 

The original title of this essay was " Eecollections of the South- 
Sea House." After leaving Christ's Hospital in 1789, Lamb obtained 
through Samuel Salt, his father's employer, a clerkship in the South- 
Sea House, September, 1791, and there he remained until February 8, 
1792. In April, 1792, he became a clerk in the East India House, 
where he was to remain for thirty-three years. 

2. In a way typical of many of his mystifications, Lamb misstates 
the date — Such it was forty years ago, when I knew it. In a letter 
to Taylor, the publisher of the London Magazine, however, he notes 
that it was thirty, not forty, years ago. See Elia, in the Explanatory 
Index. 

The thirty years' recollection marks the most remarkable feature of 
the essay. Lamb here records, accurately and sympathetically, his 
youthful impressions, remembered in his forty- fourth year. His accu- 
racy, however, is possibly explained by the fact that his brother John 
remained at the South-Sea House until his death in 1825, and Charles 
probably visited his brother there, thus keeping his impressions fresh. 

3. Living accounts and accountants puzzle me. As Lamb was living 
among figures at the India House, this statement may be looked upon 
as a perversion of the truth. Elsewhere he speaks of his '* remarkably 
neat hand" and "his expertness in bookkeeping." Yet there is evi- 
dence that Lamb tells the painful truth in the statement quoted. One 
of Lamb's fellow-accountants is reported to have said that Lamb was 
" neither a neat nor an accurate accountant, and that he made frequent 
errors which he wiped out with his little finger." Stronger than all 
other evidences presented is Lamb's letter of March 11, 1823, to Bernard 
Barton, his Quaker friend, in which he says: "I think I lose £100 
a year at the India House owing solely to my want of neatness in 
making up accounts. How I puzzle 'em out at last is the wonder. I 
have to do with millions! ! " We may readily surmise that Lamb's 
sympathies were elsewhere than with the dry accounts in the South- 
Sea House, 

The distinctive literary feature of this essay is the deliberate de- 
scription, with many details, of many persons, without forgetting the 
look of the whole and the general atmosphere. You will find a similar 
descriptive essay in Hawthorne's Introduction to The Scarlet Letter, 
where Hawthorne describes the custom-house o£6.cers. 

227 



228 NOTES 



Oxford in the Vacation. London Magazine, October, 1820. 

(Pages 9-16.) 

Canon Ainger makes the following note on this essay : — 
" Lamb was fond of spending his annual holiday in one or other of 
the great University towns, more often in Cambridge. . . . On its first 
appearance in the London, the paper was dated ' August 5, 1820. From 
my rooms facing the Bodleian.' A sonnet written a year before at 
Cambridge tells of the charm that University associations had for 
one who had been debarred through infirmity of health and poverty 
from a University education : — 

" ' I was not trained in Academic bowers, 
And to those learned streams I nothing owe 
Which copious from those twin fair founts do flow ; 
Mine have been anything but studious hours. 
Yet can I fancy, wandering 'mid thy towers, 
Myself a nursling, Granta, of thy lap ; 
My brow seems tightening with the Doctor's cap 
And I walk gowned ; feel unusual powers. 
Strange forms of logic clothe my admiring speech, 
Old Ramus' ghost is busy at my brain ; 
And my skull teems with notions infinite. 
Be still, ye reeds of Camus, while I teach 
Truths which transcend the searching schoolmen's vein, 
And half had staggered that stout Stagirite ! ' " 

There is some evidence, however, as Mr. Lucas points out, that 
Lamb wrote this essay under the influence of Cambridge and not of 
Oxford. " He spent," says Mr. Lucas, " some weeks in the summer 
of 1820 at Cambridge and transferred the scene to Oxford by way of 
mystification." 

Moreover, Lamb had not been at Oxford for some years, and it was 
at Cambridge that he met Dyer and that he saw the Milton Mss. 

11. To such a one as myself. Lamb was prevented from attending 
either Oxford or Cambridge, both by his poverty and by an impedi- 
ment in his speech. Even as the youngest member of the family, 
Cliarles had to begin to contribute his mite toward the purchase of the 
daily bread, and consequently he began his career of drudgery at the 
" desk's dead wood." Had he not had an infirmity of speech, he would 
doubtless, through his aptitude for studies, have proceeded to be a 
" Grecian " at Christ's Hospital, and thence would have gone to one of 
the universities to prepare for holy orders — a profession for which his 
stuttering unfitted him. That he never was a member of the goodly 
fellowship of a university was a cause for constant regret on his part. 
But he had the spirit of the academic bowers. William Hazlitt, de- 
scribing a visit of Lamb's to Oxford in 1810, says : "He and the old 



OXFORD IN THE VACATION 229 

colleges were hail-fellow well-met ; and in the quadrangles, he ' walked 
gowned.' " 

12. I go about in black. Throughout his life Lamb affected, accord- 
ing to Leigh Hunt, " a Quaker-like plainness." Talfourd, Procter, 
Hood, Patmore, and others have described Lamb in the habit as he 
lived, and all agree on one point — his " clerk-like black." Patmore, 
in 1835, writes : " Lamb had laid aside his snuff-colored suit before I 
knew him ; and during the last ten years of his life, he was never 
seen in anything but a suit of uniform black. Though his dress was 
' black ' in name and nature, he always contrived that it should exist 
only in a state of rusty brown." 

13. Unsettle my faith. In the London Magazine the following foot- 
note occurs : — 

" There is something to me repugnant at, any time in written hand. 
The text never seems determinate. Print settles it. I had thought of 
the Lycidas as of a full-grown beauty — as springing up with all its 
parts absolute — till, in an evil hour, I was shown the original copy of 
it, together with the other minor poems of its author, in the library of 
Trinity, kept like some treasure, to be proud of. I wish they had 
thrown them in the Cam, or sent them after the latter cantos of 
Spenser, into the Irish Channel. How it staggered me to see the fine 
things iu their ore ! interlined, corrected ! as if their words were mor- 
tal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure ! as if they might have been 
otherwise, just as good ! as if inspiration were made up of parts, and 
these fluctuating, successive, indifferent ! I will never go into the 
workshop of any great artist again, nor desire a sight of his picture 
till it is fairly off the easel ; no, not if Raphael were to be alive again, 
and painting another Galatea." 

14. Injustice to him. As published in the London Magazine, the 
essay contained the following footnote : — 

*' Violence or injustice certainly none, Mr. Elia. But you will 
acknowledge that the charming unsuspectingness of our friend has 
sometimes laid him open to attacks, which though savoring (we hope) 
more of waggery than malice — such is our unfeigned respect for G. D. 
— might, we think, much better have been omitted. Such was that silly 
joke of L[amb], who, at the time the question of the Scotch Novels was 
first agitated, gravely assured our friend — who as gravely went 
about repeating it in all companies — that Lord Castlereagh had 
acknowledged himself to be the author of Waverley ! Note — not hy 
Elia." But the note was almost certainly by Elia. 

15. The passage set in brackets, beginning " D. commenced life," 
called forth a protest from both Dyer and his friends, and Lamb, when 
he collected Elia in 1823, omitted the passage. Lamb affirmed that 
*' it was his ambition to make more familiar to the public, a character, 
which, for integrity and single-heartedness, he has long been accus- 
tomed to rank among the best patterns of his species." But Lamb's 



230 NOTES 

roguish propensities would not allow him to let Dyer rest in peace. 
In 1823 he published " Amicus Redivivus," an exaggerated and fantas- 
tic account of Dyer's peculiarities. And again, in a letter, he humbly 
apologized to Dyer. Lamb's meekness and humor, coupled with Dyer's 
simpleness and unworldliness, kept them friends until Lamb's death. 

Christ's Hospital. London Magazine, November, 1820. 
(Pages 17-31.) 

In this essay we again find Lamb's fondness for mystification. From 
the beginning of the essay to the paragraph beginning, " I was a hypo- 
chondric lad," Lamb assumes the personality of Coleridge; from the 
paragraph indicated to the close of the essay, he drops the mask. 
Both Lamb and Coleridge entered the Blue-Coat School on the same 
date, July 17, 1782 ; Lamb being a little over seven and a half years 
old, and Coleridge nearly ten. Coleridge did not leave the school 
until 1791 ; Lamb left in 1789. See Christ's Hospital in the Index. 

17. Mr. Lamb's " Works." *' The Works of Charles Lamb : in Two 
Volumes. London. Printed for C. and J. Oilier, Vere Street, Bond Street, 
1818." Such was the title of Lamb's first "Works." In the volumes 
was an essay, first printed in the Gentleman's Magazine, June, 1813, 
entitled "Recollections of Christ's Hospital," which was written in an 
enthusiastic and laudatory vein, and which stood for the dignity of 
the school. In the essay written in 1820, Lamb sees the reverse — the 
hardships and the utter loneliness of unhappy schoolboys. Coleridge, 
in his Biographia Literaria, Chapter I, and Leigh Hunt in his Auto- 
biography, Chapters III and IV, write on the same theme. 

17 . The worthy sub-treasurer to the Inner Temple. Randal Norris. 

18. The good old relative. Sara Lamb, Aunt Hetty, who died in 
1797. In a letter written to Coleridge, January 5, 1797, Lamb writes 
of this aunt, then on her deathbed, " My poor old aunt, whom you have 
seen, the kindest, goodest creature to me when I was at school; who 
used to toddle there to bring me good things, when I, schoolboy-like, 
only despised her for it, and used to be ashamed to see her come and 
sit herself down on the old coal-hole steps as you went into the gram- 
mar school, and open her apron, and bring out her bason, with some 
nice thing she had caused to be saved for me." And again in his poem 
" Lines Written on the Day of My Aunt's Funeral " he writes : — 

" I have not forgot 
How thou didst love thy Charles, when he was yet 
A prating schoolboy : I have not forgot 
The busy joy on that important day. 
When, childlike, the poor wanderer was content 
To leave the bosom of paternal love. 
His childhood's play-place, and his early homCj 



CHRIST S HOSPITAL 



231 



For the rude festerings of a stranger's hand, 
Hard uncouth tasks, and schoolboy's scanty fare. 
How did thine eye peruse him round and round 
And hardly knew him in his yellow coats, 
Red leathern belt, and gown of russet blue." 

18.1 was a poor friendless boy. This was particularly true of Cole- 
ridge. He came from Ottery St. Mary (not " Sweet Calne in Wilt- 
shire"), in Devonshire, where he was born, 
and he had no friends in London. In his Bio- 
graphia Literaria he says : " In my friendless 
wanderings on our leave days (for I was an 
orphan, and had scarce any connections in Lon- 
don) , highly was I delighted if any passenger, 
especially if he were dx-essed in black, would 
enter into conversation with me." 

18. Whole-day leaves. Though the boys at 
Christ's Hospital did not fare sumptuously at 
the table, they were not stinted in the matter 
of holidays. In addition to every alternate 
Wednesday for a whole day, eleven days at 
Easter, four weeks in the summer, and fifteen 
days at Christmas, they enjoyed vacation days 
on church festival days and national holidays 
to the extent of at least thirty days every year. 
It is pleasant to know that Lamb, fired with 
the tales " of the Abyssinian Pilgrim's explan- 
atory rambling after the cradle of the infant 
Nilus," went a-wandering in quest of the quaint 
and the unknown of London town and its sub- 
urbs. 

25. "French and English." "Boys still {From an old print.) 
play ' French and English.' A piece of paper a Christ's Hospital 
is covered with dots, and the players — one g^jY 

French and one English — in turn close their 

eyes and slash a pencil across it. The dots through which the line has 
passed are counted after each stroke, and that nation wins whose pencil 
annihilates most." — Lucas. 

31. Catalogue of Grecians. The catalogue, of course, is not com- 
plete. Lamb was never a Grecian, but as a deputy-Grecian, from 
whom the Grecians were selected, he held his honor high. In a letter 
to Dyer, who was a Grecian, Lamb writes in 1831 : " I don't know how 
it is, but I keep my rank in fancy still since schooldays. I can never 
forget I was a deputy-Grecian! Alas! what I am now? What is a 
Leadenhall clerk, an India pensioner, to a deputy-Grecian ? How art 
thou fallen, O Lucifer ! " 




232 NOTES 

Our notes on this essay may fittingly close with the following story 
told by Mr. Lucas : — 

" A blue-coat boy walking through a residential street in London, 
was astonished to hear himself hailed by a strange, bareheaded, elderly 
gentleman standing on a doorstep. ' Come here, boy,' he cried, ' come 
here ' ; and when the boy reached him, he pressed a five-shilling piece 
in his hand, with the words, ' In memory of Charles Lamb.' " 

The Two Races of Men. London Magazine, December, 1820. 

(Pages 31-37.) 

The genesis of this essay is found in at least two of Lamb's letters. 
On April 9, 1816, he wrote to Wordsworth, who had just sent him two 
books of poems : " I have not bound the poems yet. I wait till people 
have done borrowing them. I think I shall get a chain, and chain 
them to my shelves, tnore Bodleino [after the manner of the Bodley 
library], and people may come and read them at chain's length. For 
of those who borrow, some read slow; some mean to read, but don't 
read; and some neither read nor meant to read, but borrow to leave 
you an opinion of their sagacity. I must do my money-borrowing 
frieads the justice to say that there is nothing of this caprice or wan- 
tonness of alienation in them. When they borrow my money they 
never fail to make use of it." Again, in a letter to Coleridge, written 
in the autumn of 1820, Lamb touches more immediately on the borrow- 
ing habit. " Why will you make your visits, which should give pleas- 
ure, matter of regret to your friends ? You never come but you take 
away some folio that is a part of my existence. [Here, in the letter, 
Lamb tells how his " maid Becky " had told Lamb that Coleridge had 
taken away " Luster's Tables," meaning Luther's Table Talk!] I was 
obliged to search personally among my shelves, and a huge fissure 
suddenly disclosed to me the nature of the damage I had sustained." 
The letter closes with: "my third shelf (northern compartment) from 
the top has two devilish gaps, where you have knocked out its two 
eye-teeth. 

" Your wronged friend, 

" Charles Lamb." 



New Year's Eve. London Magazine, January, 1821. (Pages 37-44.) 

The " melancholy pessimism " of this essay did not go unchallenged. 
Lamb's friend Southey remonstrated, accusing Elia of wanting "a, 
sounder religious feeling." "A Father" rebuked Lamb in the Feb- 
ruary number of the London Magazine, saying that if Lamb had pos- 
sessed offspring of his own he would not have avowed that he had 
" almost ceased to hope." And in the August number of the same 
magazine Lamb was reminded by a writer signing himself " Olen " 



NEW year's eve 233 

** that the grave was not the end, was asked to consider the promises 
of the Christian faith, and finally was offered a glimpse of some of 
the friends he would meet in heaven — among them Ulysses, Shake- 
speare, and Alice W n." — Lucas. 

Lamh, on receiving this poetical "Epistle to Elia," replied: "Poor 
Elia . . . does not pretend to see very clear revelations of a future 
state of being as ' Olen ' seems gifted with. He stumbles about dark 
mountains at best ; but he knows at least how to be thankful for this 
life, and is too thankful, indeed, for certain relationships lent him 
here, not to tremble for a possible resumption of the gift. He is too 
apt to express himself lightly, and cannot be sorry for the present occa- 
sion, as has called forth a reproof so Christianlike." 

These harmless exaggerations form a contrast to the more sympa- 
thetic understanding of the essay published in the London for March, 
1821. Horace Smith, the writer, says in part : — 

" How I could expatiate on the quaint lugubrious pleasantry, the 
social yet deep philosophy of your friend Elia, as particularly illus- 
trated in his delighted paper upon New Year's Eve ! — but the bandy- 
ing of praise among Correspondents has too Magazinish a look ; — I 
have learnt his essay by heart. Is it possible, said I to myself, when I 
first devoured it, that such a man can really feel such horrors at the 
thought of death, which he describes with so much humorous solem- 
nity? But when I came to his conclusion, wherein he talks of the 
fears, 'just now expressed or affected,' I had presently a clue to his 
design — Ha ! I exclaimed, thou are the very Janus who hast always 
delighted in antithetical presentments ; who lovest to exhibit thy 
tragic face in its most doleful gloom, that thou mayst incontinently 
turn upon us the sunshine of thy comic smile. Thou wouldst not paint 
the miseries endured by a friendless boy at Christ's, without a com- 
panion piece, portraying the enjoyments of a more fortunate young- 
ster." 

39. Small-pox at five. Whether this is fiction or fact, is not known. 

39. From what have I not fallen, if the child I remember was in- 
deed myself. Lamb, in 1795, wrote the following sonnet, which heal; 
explains the allusion : — 

•* We were two pretty babes ; the youngest she, 
The youngest, and the loveliest far I ween, 
And Innocence her name : the time has been 
We two did love each other's company ; 
Time was, we two had wept to have been apart. 
But when by show of seeming good beguiled, 
I left the garb and manners of a child, 
And my first love for man's society. 
Defiling with the world my virgin heart — 
My loved companion dropt a tear, and fled, 



234 NOTES 

And hid in deepest shades her awful head. 
Beloved, who sha,ll tell me, where thou art — 
In what delicious Eden to be found — 
That I may seek thee, the wide world around ? " 

"Lamb seems in this essay," says Canon Ainger, "to have written 
with the express purpose of presenting the reverse side of a passage in 
his favorite Religio Medici. Sir Thomas Browne had there written, 
' I thank God I have not those strait ligaments, or narrow obligations 
to the world, as to dote on life, or be convulsed and tremble at the 
name of death.' . . . Lamb clung to the things he saw and loved — the 
friends, the books, the streets, and crowds around him, and he was 
not ashamed to confess that death meant for him the absence of all 
these, and that he could not look it steadfastly in the face." 

Mrs. Battle's Opinions on "Whist. London Magazine, February, 
1821. (Pages 44-51.) 

Canon Ainger and Mr. Lucas, who have the best information on the 
identity of Sarah Battle, furnish the following notes. 

Canon Ainger says: " There is probably no evidence existing as to 
the original of Mrs. Battle. Several of Lamb's commentators have en- 
deavored to prove her identity with Mary Field, Lamb's grandmother, 
so long resident with the Plumer family ; the sole fact common to them 
being that Lamb represents Mrs. Battle (in the essay on ' Blakes- 
moor ') as having died at Blakesware, where also Mrs. Field ended her 
days. But any one who will read, after the present essay, Lamb's in- 
disputably genuine and serious verses on Mrs. Field's death (' The 
Grandame ') will feel that to have transformed her into this ' gentle- 
woman born' with the fine 'last century countenance,' would have 
been little short of a mauvalse plaisanterie, of which Lamb was not 
likely to have been guilty." 

Mr. Lucas, in part, says: "Mrs. Battle was probably, in real life, 
to a large extent, Sarah Burney, the wife of Rear- Admiral eTames Bur- 
ney, Lamb's friend, and the center of the whist-playing set to which he 
belonged." 

Leigh Hunt, in reprinting this essay in the London Journal, makes 
this happy introduction to it: " Here followeth, gentle reader, the im- 
mortal record of Mrs. Battle and her whist; a game which the author, 
as thou wilt see, wished he could play forever; and, accordingly, in 
the deathless pages of his wit, forever will play it." And, we may add, 
Lamb's Sarah Battle is more vital and lifelike than if he had transcribed 
the realities of Mrs. Mary Field or Mrs. Sarah Burney : through the me- 
dium of literary art he has ci*eated an immortal fictitious character 

50. As nurturing the bad passions. In the London Magazine the 
parenthesis " (dropping for a while the speaking mask of old Sarah 
Battle)," appeared. 



A CHAPTER ON EARS 235 



A Chapter on Ears. London Magazine , March, 1821. Pages 51-57. 

Again we are indebted to Canon Ainger, Talfourd, and Mr. Lucas 
for some illuminating notes. 

Ainger says: "Lamb's indifference to music is one of the best- 
known features of his personality." Compare the admirably humorous 
verses, " Free Thoughts on Several Eminent Composers," beginnings 

*' Some cry up Hayden, some Mozart, 
Just as the whim bites ; for my part 
I do not care a farthing candle 
For either of them, or for Handel, — 
Cannot a man live free and easy 
Without admiring Pergolesi ? 
Or through the world with comfort go 
That never heard of Dr. Blow?" 

" Lamb was entirely destitute of what is called ' a taste for music' 
A few old tunes ran in his head ; now and then the expression of a 
senticaent, though never a song, touched him with rare and exquisite 
delight. . . . But usually music only confused him, and an opera — to 
which he once or twice tried to accompany Miss Isola — was to him a 
maze of sound in which he almost lost his wits." — Thomas N. Tal- 
fourd in Letters of Lamb. 

Mr. Lucas is of the opinion that " Lamb was not so utterly without 
ear as he states. Crabb Robinson in his diary records more than once 
that Lamb hummed tunes, and Barron Field, in the memoir of Lamb 
contributed by him to the Annual Biography arid Obituary for 1836, 
mentions his love for certain beautiful airs, among them Kent's ' O 
that I had wings like a dove ' [mentioned in this essay], and Han- 
del's ' From mighty kings.' Lamb says that it was Braham who 
awakened a love of music in him." 

Many years before, in 1808, in a letter to Manning, Lamb writes: 
"Do you like Braham's singing? The little Jew has bewitched me. 
I followed like as the boys followed Tom the Piper. He cures me of 
melancholy as David cured Saul. ... I was insensible to music till 
he gave me a new sense." 

Another evidence that Lamb was not without the receptive sense for 
music, even though he lacked the expressive power, lies in his appre- 
ciation of the music of bells. His poem "Sabbath Bells," and the 
slight reference in the story "First going to Church" in Mrs. Leices- 
ter's School — "But I never can hear the sweet noise of bells, that I 
don't think of the angels singing " — prove that the "concord of sweet 
sounds " was not without fascination for Lamb. 

52. I was never. . . in the pillory. Mr. Lucas points out some cir- 
cumstantial evidence that Lamb did spend a brief time in the pillory at 
Barnet for brawling on z. Sunday. If there is any truth in the asser- 



236 NOTES 

tion, the incident was " nearly as much of a joke on the part of the au- 
thorities as on the part of Lamb." — Lucas's edition of Lamb, I, 473. 

A Quakers' Meeting. London Magazine, April, 1821. 
(Pages 57-62.) 

Lamb once told Barton, the Quaker poet, " In feelings, and matters 
not dogmatical, I hope I am half a Quaker." Leigh Hunt tells how 
Lamb, even as a boy, had impressed him by his Quaker-like behavior. 
We have already noted that Hood spoke of Lamb as a " Quaker in 
black." In a letter to Coleridge, February 13, 1797, Lamb says: "Tell 
Lloyd [the Lloyds of Birmingham, intimate friends of Lamb, were 
Quakers] I have had thoughts of turning Quaker, and have been 
reading, or am rather just beginning to read, a most capital book, 
good thoughts in good language, William Penn's ' No Cross, no Crown ' ; 
I like it immensely. Unluckily I went to one of his meetings, tell him, 
in St. John Street, yesterday, and saw a man under all the agitations 
and workings of a fanatic, who believed himself under the influence of 
some * inevitable presence.' This cured me of Quakerism ; I love it in 
the books of Penn and Woolman, but I detest the vanity of a man 
thinking he speaks by the spirit, when what he says an ordinary man 
might say without all that quaking and trembling." This letter, 
written twenty-four years before the essay, shows how tenaciously 
Lamb remembers incidents and how accurately he works the raw 
material of life into finished literary product. Lamb, as Mr. Lucas 
remarks, had the "gift of keeping together all his thoughts on every 
subject," 

One of Lamb's poems (and it is one of the sweetest lyrics in the 
English language) is entitled "Hester." Hester Savory was a dark- 
eyed Quaker, of whom Lamb wrote in a letter to Manning in March, 
1803, " I send you some verses I have made on the death of a young 
Quaker you may have heard me speak of as being in love with for 
some years while I lived at Pentonville, though I had never spoken to 
her in my life." In all probability the bright-eyed Hester never knew 
of Lamb's affection for her. 

If possible, find the poem " Hester " and read it. 

Imperfect Sympathies. London Magazine, August, 1821. 
(Pages 63-71.) 

"Jews, Quakers, Scotchmen, and other Imperfect Sympathies" was 
the original cumbrous title of this essay. 

We must take some of Lamb's assertions in this essay with a grain 
of salt. We know, for instance, that Lamb did not dislike all Scotch- 
men, that his circle of acquaintances among Scotchmen was small, 
and that he never visited Scotland. Moreover, he had an overflowing 



WITCHES — valentine's DAY 237 

admiration for Edward Irving; he called Allan Cunningham "the 
great-hearted Scot " and signed a letter to him, " Yours, with perfect 
sympathy " ; and he loved the great humorist Thomas Hood. Among 
the Jews he counted John Braham, the great tenor, one of his lights. 
(Read the note on Braham in "A Chapter on Ears.'") As for the 
Quakers, Lamb's sympathies were neither unlimited nor restricted. 
He loved the " early Quakers," such as Penn and Woolman, but he 
did not like the fanatical Quakers. Certainly a writer whose very 
presence and personality gave an impression to observers of "a certain 
Quakerlikeness " could scarcely deny an inward sympathy for the best 
of the sect. 

70. I was travelling. This incident did not happen to Lamb, but 
was told to him by Sir Anthony Carlisle, the surgeon, " the best story- 
teller I ever heard." 

Witches and Other Night Fears. London Magazine, 
October, 1821. (Pages 71-78.) 

Thirteen years before the publication of this essay Lamb wrote on 
a similar theme in Mrs. Leicester's School — Maria Howe's story of 
*' The Witch Aunt," which you should read. 

One expression in the essay caused a boiling over of the literary 
teapot. Lamb's sentence, " Dear Little T. H. [Thornton Hunt, the 
son of Leigh Hunt], who of all children has been brought up with the 
most scrupulous exclusion of every taint of superstition," etc., gave 
Robert Southey an opportunity to make an indirect attack on Hunt 
for his infidelity to the Christian belief. In the Quarterly Review, 
July, 1823, Southey spoke of unbelievers as too dishonest to express 
their real feelings and too cowardly to divest themselves of their fear, 
adding, " There is a remarkable proof of this in Ella's Essays, a book 
which only wants a sounder religious feeling to be as delightful as it is 
original." Lamb resented this slur, wrote an open letter to Southey, 
and defended both himself and Hunt. In a letter to his Quaker friend 
Barton, he said, " He [Southey] might have spared an old friend such 
a construction of a few careless flights, that meant no harm to reli- 
gion." Southey, seeing his stupidity, repented his rashness, visited 
Lamb, and receiving Lamb's apology, reestablished their friendship. 

Valentine's Day. (Pages 78-82.) 

This essay originally appeared in Leigh Hunt's Examiner, February 
14 and 15, 1819, and reappeared in Hunt's Indicator, February 14, 
1821, signed with four stars -^ a not unusual custom of Lamb's. The 
essay, as it was published in the Indicator, formed a part of a longer 
article entitled "Donne's and Drayton's Lines on Valentine's Day, 
with Remarks." The opening of the essay, "Hail to thy returning 



238 NOTES 

festival, old Bishop Valentine! " is a remembrance of Donne's verses 
beginning " Hail, Bishop Valentine! " 

In the American edition of Lamb, published in 1828, the editor in- 
serted an essay having the same title as Lamb's essay, and originally 
published in the London Magazine. In all probability this spurious 
essay was by B. W. Procter, who, more than the other imitators of 
Lamb, caught the style and the quips of Lamb's thought. Lamb had 
other imitators, but none of them ever successfully turned their 
imitations to much account. To quote De Quincey, "the mercurialities 
of Lamb were infinite" — so infinite that they could not, cannot, be 
imitated. 



My Kelations. London Magazine, June, 1821. (Pages 82-89.) 

Lamb's essays are so full of autobiographical references, often pur- 
posely disguised, that it makes an interesting literary chase to distin- 
guish the true from the false. It was one of Lamb's specialties to make 
curious perversions, to disguise real incidents and real persons, to 
make deliberate mystifications and " to mingle romance with reality." 
But above all other essayists in the English language Lamb could take 
" homely and familiar things and make them fresh and beautiful." 

You will note that the name of Lamb's mother never occurs in any of 
Lamb's essays. The omission is easily explained. Out of considera- 
tion for his sister, Mary Lamb, who in a fit of insanity had killed their 
mother, he never published any reference to the mother or to the awful 
event. 

82. At that point of life. Lamb was forty-six years old at this 
time. 

82. I had an aunt. Aunt Hetty, the sister of John Lamb, the father 
of Charles, who lived with the family. See note to "Christ's Hospi- 
tal," " The good old relative,'^ page 230. 

83. "Adventures of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman." "The 

story tells how the unfortunate Mons. dvi F , eldest son of the 

Baron du F , married against his father's will, and suffered in 

consequence many privations including imprisonment in a convent, 
from which he escaped by a jump of fifty feet." — Lucas. 

83. The chapel in Essex Street. The chief house of worship of the 
sect called Unitarian ; Lamb for a time was a member of the sect, but 
ultimately left it. Concerning Lamb's religion, De Quincey writes : — 

" Was this man, so memorably good by lifelong sacrifice of himself, 
in any profound sense a Christian ? The impression is that he was not. 
We, from private communications with him, can undertake to say 
that, according to his knowledge and opportunities for the study 
of Christianity, he loas. . . . We do not undertake to say that in his 
knowledge of Christianity he was everywhere profound or consistent ; 



MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE 239 

but he was always earnest in his aspirations after its spiritualities, and 
had an apprehensive ssnse of its power." 

83. Brother, or sister, I never had any— to know them. "Here 
Lamb writes as Elia, yet using actual facts to color his fiction — 
whether to amuse those who were in the secret or to perplex those who 
were not, it is impossible to say." (Ainger's Charles Lamb.) Lamb 
had two sisters named Elizabeth, the elder of whom he never knew ; 
the younger Elizabeth was seven years older than Charles. Only three 
of the Lamb children grew to full age : John, Mary, and Charles. In 
this essay John and Mary are described as cousins, named James and 
Bridget Elia. John Lamb, Charles's brother, is fittingly portrayed by 
Canon Ainger : — 

" The mixture of the man of the world, dilettante, and sentimental- 
ist — not an infrequent combination — is here described with graphic 
power. All that we know of John Lamb, the ' broad, burly, jovial,' 
living his bachelor life in chambers at the old Sea-House, is supported 
and confirmed by this passage. Touching his extreme sensibility to 
the physical sufferings of animals, there is a letter of Charles to Crabb 
Robinson of the year 1810, which is worth noting. ' My brother, whom 
you have met at my rooms (a plump, good-looking man of seven-and- 
forty), has written a book about humanity, which I transmit to you 
herewith. Wilson, the publisher, has put it into his head that you 
can get it reviewed for him. I dare say it is not in the scope of your 
reviews; but if you could put it into any likely train, be would rejoice. 
For, alas! our boasted humanity partakes of vanity. As it is, he 
teases me to death with choosing to suppose that I could get it into all 
the Reviews at a moment's notice. I! ! ! — who have been set up as" a 
mark for them to throw at, and would willingly consign them all to 
Megaera's snaky locks. But here's the book, and don't show it to Mrs. 
Collier, for I remember she makes excellent eel soup, and the leading 
points of the book are directed against that very process.' " 



IVlACKERY End, in Hertfordshire. London Magazine, July, 1821. 

(Pages 89-94.) 

89. Bridget Elia. Mary Lamb. The story of the brother and sister 
cannot be too often told ; their lives were so bound together that to 
tell the life of one is to tell the life of the other. Of Mary Lamb we 
read much in her brother's essays and letters, especially in " Mrs. 
Battle," " My Relations," " Old China," and in the essay under con- 
sideration. Her contemporaries have also left pleasing pictures of 
her. " She will live forever in the memory of her friends," says Crabb 
Robinson, " as one of the most amiable and admirable of women." 
" She wore a neat cap," writes Mr. Procter, "of the fashion of her 
youth; an old-fashioned dress. Her face was pale and somewhat 



240 NOTES 

square, but very placid, with gray intelligent eyes. She was very 
mild in her manners to strangers ; and to her brother, gentle and 
tender always. She had often an upward look of peculiar meaning 
when directed towards him as though to give him assurance that all was 
then well with her." Their lives were spent in mutual anticipation of 
each other's needs, and a more fitting companionship the world of 
letters does not show. In the words of Canon Ainger, " A common 
education, whether that of sweet garden scenes, or the choice fancies 
and meditations of poet and moralist — a sense of mutual need — a 
profound pity for each other's frailties — of these were forged the bond 
that held them, and years of suffering and self-denial had made it ever 
more strong." In 1805, during one of Mary Lamb's attacks. Lamb 
wrote to Dorothy Wordsworth, " All my strength is gone, and I am 
like a fool, bereft of her cooperation. I dare not think, lest I should 
think wrong ; so used am I to look up to her in the least and the 
biggest perplexity. . . . She is older and better and wiser than I, and 
all my wretched imperfections I cover to myself by resolutely thinking 
on her goodness." Mary Lamb died on the 20th of May, 1847, aged 
eighty-two years, having outlived her beloved brother nearly thirteen 
years. 

90. Narrative teases me. " Lamb never possessed the faculty of 
constructing a plot either for drama or novel ; and while he luxuriated 
in the humor of Smollett, the wit of Fielding, or the solemn pathos of 
Richardson, he was not amused, but perplexed, by the attempt to 
tread the windings of a story which conducts to their most exquisite 
passages through the mazes of adventures." — Talfourd. Mary Lamb 
oii the other hand, according to Thomas Westwood, had a passion for 
novel-reading. 

91. Good old English reading. In the library of Samuel Salt. 

91. The oldest thing I remember is Mackery End. " Lamb's first 
visit there," says Mr. Lucas, "must have been when he was a very 
little boy — somewhere about 1780." Probably we may see recollec- 
tions of it in Mary Lamb's story, Louisa Manners, or The Farm Hovse, 
in which she describes the delights of a city child of four years on a 
farm. Read the story in Mrs. Leicester's School. The farmhouse 
described in the essay remains almost as it was in Lamb's days. 

91. A great-aunt. "Mary Field, Lamb's grandmother, was Mary 
Bruton, whose sister married, as he says, a Gladman, and was the great- 
aunt mentioned." — Lucas. In a letter to Manning, May 28, 1819, 
Lamb writes: "How are my cousins, the Gladmans of Wheathamp- 
stead, and farmer Bruton? Mrs. Bruton is a glorious woman. 

* ' Hail, Mackery End ! 

This is a fragment of a blank verse poem which I once meditated, but 
got no further." 
94. B. F. See Field, Barron, in the Index. 



THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE 241 



The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple. London Magazine, 
September, 1821. (Pages 94-106.) 

" The essay on ' The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple ' is one of the 
most varied and beautiful pieces of prose that English literature can 
boast. Eminently, moreover, does it show us Lamb as the product 
of two different ages — the child of the Renaissance of the sixteenth 
century and that of the nineteenth. It is as if both Spenser and 
Wordsworth had laid hands of blessing upon his head." — Ainger. 

" This, one of the most famous of all the essays, is rich in every kind 
of interest and every kind of literary charm. It is autobiography, his- 
tory, legend, mythology almost: so greatly are some of the figures 
projected upon the imagination." — MacDonald. 

The term " Bencher " is a reduction from the voluminous title, "The 
Worshipful Masters of the Bench of the Honorable Society of the Inner 
Temple." This is the board which governs the Inner Temple. Read 
note on Temple in the Explanatory Index. 

Lamb speaks of the Temple as one having a thorough knowledge of 
it, and indeed he knew the Temple as few men have known it. He 
was born at No. 2 Crown Oifice Row on February 10, 1775, and with the 
exception of some vacations he did not leave the Temple until he went 
to Christ's Hospital in 1782 ; there he spent his holidays until leaving 
the school in 1789 ; and again he lived there until the death of Samuel 
Salt, who owned the chambers where the Lambs dwelt, in 1792. After 
Salt's death the Lambs moved to various other quarters, but in 1801, 
Charles and Mary returned to the Temple to live at No. 16 Mitre 
Court Buildings, and, after another move away from the Temple, they 
lived at No. 4 Inner Temple Lane from 1809 to 1817. 

95. That fine Eliza^bethan hall : the hall of the Middle Temple. 

98. The winged horse. The badge of the Inner Temple. "This 
winged horse has a curious history ; for, when the horse was originally 
chosen as an emblem, he had no wings, but was ridden by two men at 
once to indicate the self-chosen poverty of the brotherhood ; in lapse of 
years the figures of the men became worn and abraded, and when re- 
stored were mistaken for wings." — Cook's Highways and Byways of 
London. 

99. Lovel. John Lamb, the father of Charles. The touching tribute 
of his son in this essay is about all we need to know of John Lamb. 
With the care of seven children, it is no wonder that he came to be a 
" broken, querulous old man," after the death of his benefactor. Salt, 
in 1792, and the tragical death of his wife in 1796. He died in 1799. 
Lamb describes him in verse, 1798 : — 

" One parent yet is left, a wretched thing, 
A sad survivor of his buried wife, 
A palsy-smitten, childish, old, old, man, 
A semblance most forlorn of what he was — 
A merry cheerful man." 



242 NOTES 



Grace before Meat. London Magazine, November, 1821. 
(Pages 106-114.) 

We have noted in the essay " New Year's Eve" that Southey had 
condemned Elia for wanthig " a sounder religious feeling." Lamb, in 
replying to Southey, suggested that the present essay may also have 
been in Southey's mind when the laureate made his unwarranted attack. 
" Perhaps the paper on 'Saying Graces ' was the obnoxious feature. 
I have endeavored there to rescue a voluntary duty — good in place, 
but never, as I remember, literally commanded — from the charge of an 
undecent formality. Rightly taken, sir, that paper was not against 
graces, but want of grace ; not against the ceremony, but the careless- 
ness and slovenliness so often observed in the performance of it." 

Dorothy Wordsworth, too, after calling the essay on the Benchers 
" exquisite," and delighting in other essays by Elia, says, " indeed the 
only one I do not quite like is the Grace before Meat." 

108. It is to praise the Gods amiss. Comus, 175-177. Although 
Lamb does not use quotation marks, he is doubtless thinking of the 
source of his remark, or he is unconsciously using the sentence as an 
unconscious remembrance, for his knowledge of Milton's poetry was 
thorough, and he " is never more happy than in quoting from or dis- 
coarsing on Milton." This is one of those sentences so often found in 
Elia, in which " one feels rather than recognizes, that a phrase, partic- 
ular, or idiom, term or expression, is an echo of something that one has 
heard or read before. This style becomes aromatic, like the perfume 
of faded rose leaves in a china jar." — Talfourd. 

111. I am no Quaker at my food. The paragraph beginning with 
these words is highly suggestive of Lamb's egotism. Canon Ainger 
discusses this prominent feature in Lamb's style very thoroughly in 
Chapter VI of his Life. The whole chapter should be read. 

113. C. V. L. Le Grice paid for the witticism, if it be his, in after 
life, when he became a clergyman and had to say many a grace in a 
different manner. 

113. Our old form at school. Mr. Lucas gives the Christ's Hospital 
graces in Lamb's day as follows : — 

grace before meat. 

"Give us thankful hearts, O Lord God, for the Table which thou 
hast spread for us. Bless thy good Creatures to our use, and us to thy 
service, for Jesus Christ, his sake. -4me/i." 

GRACE AFTER MEAT. 

"Blessed Lord, we yield thee hearty praise and thanksgiving for 
our Founders and Benefactors, by whose Charitable Benevolence thou 
hast refreshed our Bodies at this time. So season and refresh our 



dream-children: a reverie 243 

Souls with thy Heavenly Spirit, that we may live in thy Honor and 
Glory. Protect thy Church, the King, and all the Royal Family. And 
preserve us in peace and truth through Christ our Saviour. Ainen." 

114. Some one recalled a legend. Leigh Hunt tells this story more 
fully in his Aiitobioc/raphy '. "Our dress was of the coarsest and 
quaintest kind, hut was respected out of doors, and is so. It consisted 
of a hlue drugget gown, or hody, with ample skirts to it ; a yellow 
vest underneath in winter time ; small clothes of Russia duck ; worsted 
yellow stockings; a leather girdle; and a little black worsted cap, 
usually carried in the hand. I believe it was the ordinary dress of 
children in humble life during the reign of the Tudors. We used 
to flatter ourselves that it was taken from the monks ; and there went 
a monstrous tradition, that at one period i/t consisted of blue velvet 
with silver buttons. It was said, also, that during the blissful era of 
the blue velvet we had roast mutton for supper ; but that the small 
clothes not being then in existence, and the mutton suppers too luxu- 
rious, the eatables were given up for the ineffables." 

Dream-Children: A Reverie. London Magazine, January, 1822. 

(Pages 114-118.) 

This touching reverie is as nearly perfect a piece of prose as any- 
thing Charles Lamb ever wrote, and it is one of the finest prose com- 
positions in English literature. Quaintness, tenderness, sympathy, 
graceful ease, unselfishness, and delicate fancy — all are so combined 
and interfused that the reader will agree with Pater that " Lamb knows 
the secret of fine, significant touches " ; with another critic that he is 
" the most exquisite of essayists and the rarest of souls " ; with Swin- 
burne that " there is in his work a sweetness like no other fragrance, 
a magic like no second spell in all the world of letters" ; with Cole- 
ridge that " his heart is as whole as his head " ; and finally, to quote 
Coleridge again, that "Lamb every now and then irradiates, and the 
beam, though single and fine as a hair, is yet rich with colors, and I 
both see and feel it." 

It is necessary to understand the genesis of this essay in order to 
appreciate its significance. John Lamb, the brother of Charles, died 
October 26, 1821, leaving Charles all his property. Lamb was much 
grieved by the loss of his brother, the "broad, burly, jovial" John 
Lamb, and noted "a certain deadness to everything, which I think I 
may date from poor John's loss." " The death of this brother," says 
Canon Ainger, "wholly unsympathetic as he was with Charles, served 
to bring home to him his loneliness. He was left in the world with 
but one near relation, and that one [Mary Lamb] too often removed 
from him for months at a time by the saddest of affiictions. No 
wonder if he became keenly aware of his solitude. No wonder if his 
thoughts turned to what might have been, and he looked back to 



244 NOTES 

those boyish days when he wandered in the glades of Blakesware with 
Alice by his side. . . . For no reason that is apparent, while he retains 
his grandmother's real name, he places the house in Norfolk, but all 
the details that follow are drawn from Blakesware. . . . Inexpressibly 
touching, when we have once learned to penetrate the thio disguise 
in which he clothes them, are the hoarded memoirs, the tender regrets, 
which Lamb, writing by his ' lonely hearth,' thus ventures to commit 
to the uncertain sympathies of the great public. More touching still 
is the almost superhuman sweetness with which he deals with the 
character of his lately lost brother. . . . And there is something of the 
magic of genius, unless, indeed, it was a burst of uncontrollable an- 
guish, in the revelation with which his dream ends." 

114. Their great-gran(Jmother Field. Mary Field, *' for more than 
fifty years housekeeper at Blakesware, a dower-house of the Hert- 
fordshire family of Plumers." In the poem "The Grandame" Lamb 
wrote of his grandmother : — 

" For she had studied patience in the school ^ 

Of Christ ; much comfort she had thence derived, 
And was a folloioer of the Nazarene." 

The whole poem should be read. 

117. I was a lame-footed boy. " Whether Charles was ever a lame- 
footed boy, through some temporary cause, we cannot say. We know 
that at the time of the mother's death John Lamb was suffering from 
an injury to his foot, and made it (after his custom) an excuse for not 
exerting himself unduly. See the letter of Lamb to Coleridge written 
at the time. ' My brother, little disposed (I speak not without ten- 
derness for him) at any time to take care of old age and infirmities, 
had now, with his bad leg, an exemption from such duties.' " — Ainger. 



Distant Correspondents. London Magazine, March, 1822. 
(Pages 118-124.) 

This essay had its germ in a letter to Barron Field written nearly 
five years before, on August 31, 1817. The literary feat in the essay 
lies in Lamb's evolving a distinctly literary tone and method out of a 
rather commonplace letter. In the letter to Field, Lamb touches on 
the thievishness of Australia as follows : — 

" Well, and how does the land of thieves vise you? And how do you 
pass your extra-judicial intervals? Going about the streets with a 
lantern, like Diogenes, looking for an honest man? You may look 
long enough, I fancy. Do give me some notion of the manners of the 
inhabitants where you are. They don't thieve all day long, do they? 
No human property could stand such continuous battery. And what 
do they do when they an't stealing." 



THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS 245 

Compare this with the part in the essay beginning, "I cannot im- 
agine to myself wliereabout you are." You will note at once the more 
elaborate pains Lamb took in perfecting his sentences in the essay. 

Read the note on Field, Barron, in the Explanatory Index. 



The Praise of Chimney-S weepers. London Magazine, 
May, 1822. (Pages 124-132.) 

In the magazine publication the essay had the sub-title, "A May-Day 
Effusion." This essay gives abundant proof of Lamb's tenderness and 
large-hearted sympathy with humanity, "He pitied," says Procter, 
"all objects which had been neglected or despised." Pater puts the 
matter exquisitely when he says that Lamb's " simple mother-pity to 
those who suffer by accident or by unkindness has something iDrimitive 
in its largeness." " He reasoned with his heart," says another critic, 
"with his heart he loved; in his heart he lived, moved, and had his 
being." 

To get the historical background and the significance of the essay, 
read McCarthy's History of England in the Nineteenth Century, 
I, 267-273. 

The following note from Canon Ainger is interesting and instructive : 
** It is curious that in this essay Lamb does not even allude to the grave 
subject of the cruelties incident to the climbing boys' occupation — a 
question which for some years past had attracted the attention of phil- 
anthropic persons, in and out of Parliament. A year or two later, 
however, he made a characteristic offering to the cause. In 1824 James 
Montgomery of Sheffield edited a volume of prose and verse. The Chim- 
ney-Sweeper's Friend, and Climbing-boy's Album, to which many 
writers of the day contributed. Lamb, who had been applied to, sent 
Blake's poem, ' The Chimney-S weeper.' It was headed, * Communicated 
by Mr. Charles Lamb, from a very rare and curious little work ' — 
doubtless a true description of the Songs of Innocence in 1824. It is 
noteworthy that, before sending it, this incorrigible joker could not 
refrain from quietly altering Blake's ' Little Tom Dae re ' into ' Little 
Tom Toddy.' " 

The opening lines of Blake's poem were : — 

" When my mother died I was very young, 
And my father sold me while yet my tongue 
Could scarcely cry, ' Weep ! weep! weep! weep!'" 

" The boy had to climb from the fireplace to the top of the chimney 
and to announce the accomplishment of his mission by crying out 
' Sweep! ' when his soot-covered head and face emerged from the chim- 
ney-top." — McCarthy's History of England, I, 269. 



246 NOTES 



A Dissertation upon Roast Pig. London Magazine. 
September, 1822. (Pages 132-139.) 

" The idea of the discovery of roasting pigs I borrowed from 
my friend Manning," so wrote Lamb to Bernard Barton. Where 
Manning got it is a matter of discussion. Lamb, with the character- 
istic mark of genius, made his borrowed story a masterpiece. Hence 
his reference to a Chinese manuscript is a figment of his fancy. 

In an essay written more than ten years after the date of this essay, 
Lamb renounced his taste for roast pig. " Time was when Elia . . . 
preferred to all luxuries a roasted pig. But he disclaims all such green- 
sickness appetites in future, though he hath to acknowledge the receipt 
of many a delicacy in that kind from correspondents." 

138. It was over London Bridge. Another example of Lamb's whim- 
sical mystifications : Christ's Hospital was not over London Bridge. 

Preface to the Last Essays of Elia. London Magazine, 
January, 1823. (Pages 141-144.) 

In the London this preface to the Last Essays of Elia was 
entitled " A Character of the Late Elia," " By a Friend." It was 
signed Phil-Elia. It was not published until 1833, the date of the 
publication of the Last Essays, when Lamb omitted part of the 
original. 

Much literary fooling followed this Preface and the announcement 
of the editor that, " Elia is dead ! — at least so a Friend says ; but if 
he be dead we have seen him in one of those hours when he is wont to 
walk ; and his ghostship has promised us very material assistance in 
our future Numbers. . . . Indeed, the first paper in our present 
Number is one of its grave consolations." The paper referred to was 
the essay, "Rejoicings on the New Year's Coming of Age." In the 
March number of the same year came this announcement: "Elia is 
not dead! we thought as much," — written, of course, by Lamb. 

Lamb in this Preface overstates the case against himself, yet the 
truth is everywhere evident. Probably the only person who ever 
made a hostile verdict against Lamb was Carlyle, and two such men 
as Lamb and Carlyle were doomed to misunderstand each other. Of 
the two men, however. Lamb was the one to understand the situation 
when they met and to see the humor of the contrast. 

Read or reread the essays, "New Year's Eve" and "Imperfect 
Sympathies," and compare them with this essay to make an estimate 
of Lamb's view of himself. Mr. Lucas in his Life of Lamb very 
pointedly writes on this matter, " Amid the fun and mischief, the 
tenderness and humor, the eloquence and pathos of the Elia essays, 
one is continually conscious of a mind inflexibly true to itself and its 
ideals, a passionate friend of truth in all things." 



BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE — POOR RELATIONS 247 



Blakesmoor in H SHIRE. Loudon Magazine, September, 1824. 

(Pages 144r-149.) 

In this essay, except for the change of Blakesware to Blakesmoor, 
the experience is related without disguise. Blakesware in Hertford- 
shire, the ancient seat of the Plumer family, was situated about five 
miles from Ware. Here it was that Lamb's maternal grandmother, 
Mrs. Field, was housekeeper for fifty years or more, and here Charles 
and Mary Lamb spent many holidays, gathering experiences and im- 
pressions which they were to work up into literary masterpieces in 
later years — Charles in this essay and Mary in her tale entitled 
" The Young Mahometon " printed in Mrs. Leicester's School. The 
Plumers had, very early in Lamb's life, moved to another house at 
Gilston (" a newer trifle ") near Marlow, thus leaving the old-fashioned 
paternal hall to the genial grandmother and her talented grandchil- 
dren. Blakesware was demolished before the visit recorded by Lamb 
in this essay. 

In a letter to Bernard Barton, August 10, 1827, Lamb says, "Nothing 
fills a child's mind like an old Mansion — better if un- or partially 
occupied ; peopled with the spirits of deceased members of the County 
and Justices of the Quorum. Would I were buried in the peopled 
solitude of one, with my feelings at 7 years old." 

146. Mrs. Battle. Another instance of Lamb's whimsical impulse. 
In "Dream Children" Lamb tells us that Mrs. Field occupied this 
room, and Mrs. Field and Mrs. Battle were not the same person. 

147. Garden-loving poet. Andrew Mar veil, author of " On Appleton 
House, to the Lord Fairfax." 

148. The hills of Lincoln. Lamb's father came from Lincolnshire. 
In Lamb's sonnet entitled "The Family Name," he suggests that the 
name Lamb may have originated in " merry mocks and arch allusions " 
to some shepherd ancestor of the Lambs, 

" In manners guileless as his own sweet flocks." 

148. Those old W 's. A disguise for the Plumers. The 

Plumers and the Wards were later related by marriage. 

149. My Alice. See Alice W a in the Index. 

Poor REiiATioxs. London Magazine, May, 1823. (Pages 150-157.) 

Mr. MacDonald in a note on this essay makes an acute observation. 
He says, in part, " In the early part of this essay, especially the sec- 
ond paragraph. Lamb does something that is rather unusual with him 
— writes a little out of character ; not personal character so much as 
social character. He seems, that is, to speak from the midst of a sort 
of menage with which one does not readily associate him: a well- 
equipped house (with a staff of servants) ; where visitors come in a 



248 NOTES 

coach, or at least go off in one ; where the furniture is worth talking 
of, and where there are forms to stand on as well as Chippendale chairs 
to sit upon ; appearances to be kept up, and awkward moments when 
they break down. . . . Perhaps this rise in social tone was due to the 
influence of the preceding essay, and a lingering sense of gentility. 
. . . We must lower the scale of the essay a little, if we wish to get at 
the truth of the matter, the personal note : and for ' poor relations ' 
read sometimes 'poor familiar friends,' of whom Lamb had a goodly 
following." 

Lamb did indeed have a " goodly following " of visitors and a plague 
of friends. You may read of them in his Popular Fallacy on " Home," 
which is based on a capital letter to Mrs. Wordsworth written from the 
East India House, February 18, 1818. 

Stage Illusion. London Magazine, August, 1825. (Pages 157-160.) 

The original title of this essay was " Imperfect Dramatic Illusion." 
Mr. Lucas thinks that this essay was Lamb's last contribution to the 
London. 

"One of Lamb's subtlest pieces of criticism ; its subject not alto- 
gether identical with that question — as to whether the actor should 
' lose himself in his part.' It depends on the kind of part, at least, 
Lamb would say ; and in certain kinds of representation the actor, 
if he ' lose himself ' at all, must lose himself in a part-and-a-half : the 
keeping up of a perpetual aside, a good understanding with the audi- 
ence, being a subservient yet essential histrionic and temperamental 
achievement expected by the actor. . . ." — MacDonald. 

Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading. London Magazine. 
July, 1822. (Pages 161-167.) 

" Mr. Lamb's taste in books is also fine, and it is peculiar. It is not 
the worst for a little idiosyncrasy. He does not go deep into the Scotch 
novels, but he is at home in Smollett and Fielding. He is little read 
in Junius or Gibbon,* but no man can give a better account of Bur- 
ton's Anatomy of Melancholy , or Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial, 
or Fuller's Worthies, or John Bunyan's Holy War. No one is more 
unimpressible to a specious declamation ; no one relishes a recondite 
beauty more. His admiration for Shakespeare and Milton does not 
make him despise Pope ; and he can read Parnell with patience, and 
Gray with delight." — William Hazlitt. 

Mr. MacDonald makes a broad statement about the beginning of the 
second paragraph : " Perhaps no single page contains so much of what 
is characteristic of Lamb's mind as do the four lines which make the 
second paragraph of this essay." 



MARGATE HOY — SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS 249 

162. My shivering folios. Robinson, in his Diary, says : " I looked 
over Lamb's library in part. He has the finest collection of shabby 
books I ever saw ; such a number of first-rate works in very bad con- 
dition is, I think, nowhere to be found." 



The Old Margate Hoy. London Magazine, July, 1823. 
(Pages 167-17G.) 

According to Canon Ainger, " Charles and Mary Lamb had actually, 
as here stated, passed a week's holiday together at Margate when the 
former was quite a boy." Other students of Lamb, notably Talfourd 
and Hazlitt, refer the visit to September, 1801. It may be possible to 
reconcile the conflict of opinions by agreeing that Lamb may have 
made two visits to Margate, one about 1790 or 1791, when Lamb was 
fifteen — the time referred to in this essay, and the other in 1801, when 
Lamb's mature powers would Intensify the earlier impressions. 

Mr. MacDonald gives very high praise to this essay, saying that it 
" seems written, for all its lightness of touch, from a remarkably full 
mind, and shows Lamb's powers in greater variety — in greater simul- 
taneous ease and energy — than perhaps any one or two in either 
Series." Such an assertion is cause for reflection and discussion. 



Sanity of True Genius. Neio Monthly Magazine, May, 1826. 
(Pages 176-179.) 

This essay was originally published as one of the "Popular Fal- 
lacies" under the title " That Great Wit is allied to Madness." The 
subject of the essay, has ever been a more or less popular theme of 
discussion among essayists and scientists. Dryden in Absalom and 
Achitophel, Part I, 163-164, wrote the well-known couplet : — 

" Great wits are sure to madness near allied. 
And thin partitions do their bounds divide." 

His questionable assertion was made the thesis of a discussion by 
Leigh Hunt in the Indicator for November 24, 1819. In our own day 
the scientific study of genius, from the standpoint of cerebral pathol- 
ogy, has received much attention. Lombroso and Nordau are clearly 
of the opinion of Dryden, while Dr. William Hirsch, in his book Genius 
and Degeneration, inclines more to the view of Lamb. It is hardly 
necessary to say that Lamb approaches his discussion less from the 
scientific point of view than from the standpoint of literary criticism. 
Nevertheless, however unscientific he may be, he shows a wonderful 
grasp of his theme. " Nothing that Lamb has written," says Canon 
Ainger, " proves more decisively how large a part the higher imagina- 
tion plays in true criticism." 



250 NOTES 



Captain Jackson. London Magazine, November, 1824. 
(Pages 179-184.) 

This person, if there ever was such a person, has not been absolutely 
identified. The most plausible theory identifies him with Randall 
Norris of the Inner Temple, who was a constant friend of the Lambs, 
father and son. Lamb was deeply attached to him. But whether a 
real person, or an imaginary portrait, or a composite of reality and 
fiction, Captain Jackson, in Lamb's quickening touch, is an over- 
powering portrait. 

The Superannuated Man. London Magazine, May, 1825. 
(Pages 184-191.) 

Lamb was retired from the service of the India House on Tuesday, 
March 29, 1825. The story of the retirement is best told in his corre- 
spondence. To Wordsworth he wrote: ''Here ami then, after thirty- 
three years' slavery, sitting in my own room at eleven o'clock this 
finest of all April mornings, a freed man, with £441 a year for the re- 
mainder of my life, live I as long as John Dennis, who outlived his 
annuity and starved at ninety; £441, i.e. £450, with a deduction of 
£9 for a provision secured to my sister, she being survivor. ..." 

'M came home For Ever, on Tuesday of last week. The incompre- 
hensibleness of my condition overwhelmed me. It was like passing 
from life to eternity." 

To Bernard Barton he wrote : — 

" . . . I am free B. B. — free as air! 
The little bird that wings the sky 
Knows no such liberty. 

I was set free on Tuesday in last week at four o'clock. I came home 
for ever! . . . 

" Take it briefly, that for a few days I was painfully oppressed by so 
mighty a change, but it is becoming daily more natural to me. I went 
and sat among 'em all at my thirty-three years' desk yester morning ; 
and deuce take me, if I had not yearnings at leaving all my old pen- 
and-ink fellows, merry sociable lads, at leaving them in the lurch, fag, 
fag, fag! The comparison of my own superior felicity gave me any- 
thing but pleasure. B. B., I would not serve another seven years for 
seven hundred thousand pounds! " 

At the new India Oflice in Whitehall, London, Lamb's portrait, 
painted by Henry Meyer in 1826, hangs over the fireplace in the 
Revenue Committee room, bearing the simple inscription : — 

Charles Lamb, 
Clerk in the India House, 1792-1825. 



BARBARA S 251 

Lamb's " retired leisure," however, did not please him so much as he 
had anticipated. His "Popular Fallacy," entitled "That We Should 
Rise with the Lark " (1826), shows that his leisure grew burdensome. 
From the time of his retirement until his death in 1834, Lamb's life is 
marked by dejection and sadness. 

With the exception of the fictitious names of the directors, this essay 
recounts the actual facts of Lamb's release from the drudgery of the 
" desk's dead wood ." He had not served the Company, however, for 
" thirty-six years ," but for tliirty-three years. 

185. My native fields of Hertfordshire. Lamb was born and lived 
in London, but his mother and grandmother came from Hertfordshire, 
and, as you have read in " Mackery End," Lamb felt an intimate rela- 
tionship with Hertfordshire. 

186. I had grown to my desk. On September 11, 1822, Lamb wrote 
to Barton, his Quaker friend, a clerk in a bank, " I am, like you, a 
prisoner to the desk. I have been chained to that galley thirty years, 
— a long shot. I have almost grown to the wood." In a letter to 
Wordsworth he uses the telling expression, " my breast against this 
thorn of a Desk." 

187. I could "walk it away. Lamb was ever a stroller, and after his 
retirement took long walks. In a letter to Southey, August 19, 1825, 
he writes : " Mary walks her twelve miles a day some days, and I my 
twenty on others. ' Tis all holyday with me now, you know. The 
change works admirably." The following story by Mrs. Cowden 
Clarke of Lamb's walking ability is not uninteresting. 

" He was so proud of his pedestrian feats and indefatigability that he 
once told the Cowden Clarkes the story of a dog possessed by a pertina- 
cious determination to follow him day by day when he went forth to 
wander in the Enfield lanes and fields; until, unendurably teased by 
the pertinacity of this obtrusive animal, he determined to get rid of 
him by fairly tiring him out ! So he took a circuit of many miles, in- 
cluding several of the loveliest spots round Enfield, coming at last to 
a by-road with an interminable vista of up-hill distance, where the dog 
turned tail, gave the matter up, and lay down beneath a hedge, pant- 
ing, exhausted, thoroughly worn out and dead beat; while his defeater 
walked freshly home, smiling and triumphant." 



Barbara S . London Magazine, April, 1825. (Pages 192-197.) 

This story, for it is more of a story than an essay, shows Lamb at 
his best in invention, in whimsicality, in blending fact and fiction, and 
in making a tangle of mystifications. Canon Ainger's note enlightens 
us on the real facts of the story. " The note appended by Lamb to 
this essay, as to the heroine being named Street, and having three 
times changed her name by successive marriages, is one of thie most 



252 NOTES 

elaborate of his fictions. The real heroine of the story, as admitted 
by Lamb at the time, was the admirable comedian, Fanny Kelly, an 
attached friend of Charles and Mary Lamb. ... In the year 1875 
Miss Kelly furnished Mr. Charles Kent, who was editing the centenary 
edition of Lamb's works, with her own interesting version of the 
anecdote. It was in 1799, when Fanny Kelly was a child of nine, that 
the incident occurred, not at the old Bath Theatre, but at Drury Lane, 
where she had been admitted as a ' miniature chorister ,' at a salary of 
a pound a week. After his manner, Lamb has changed every detail — 
the heroine, the site of the theatre, the amount of the salary, the name 
of the treasurer." 

Miss Kelly, with the "divine plain face," was a special favorite of 
Lamb's. See his sonnets " To Miss Kelly," and " To a celebrated 
female performer in The Blind Boy." 

Further interest is added to the story by the fact that Lamb once 
proposed marriage to Miss Kelly. 

194. Impediment in my speech. Cf. note on Oxford in the Vacation, 
page 228, regarding Lamb's impediment in his speech. 



Rejoicings upon the New Year's Coming of Age. London 
Magazine, January, 1823. (Pages 197-203.) 

This essay describing the procession of the "Merry Days" of all 
the year is not, as one might naturally think, a tour de force — a trial 
at an infinitely difficult theme ; it is as native to the spirit of Lamb as 
any other of his essays. For Charles Lamb dearly loved a holiday. 
We have noted his pleasure in the holidays granted at Christ's Hospi- 
tal, and if report is true, he lost no occasion in taking a vacation at 
the India House. One famous story tells how a superior official of the 
India House remarked, " I notice, Mr, Lamb, that j^ou come very late 
every morning." "Yes," replied Lamb, "but see how early I go." 
Another story reveals a humorous excuse for taking a holiday. One 
day he "was observed to enter the office hastily and in an excited 
manner, assumed no doubt for the occasion, and to leave by an opposite 
door. He appeared no more that day. He stated the next morning, 
• in explanation, that as he was passing through Leadenhall Market, on 
his way to the office he accidentally trod on a butcher's heel. ' I apolo- 
gized,' said Lamb 'to the butcher, but the latter retorted : "Yes, but 

your excuses won't cure my broken heel, and ," said he, seizing 

his knife, " I'll have it out of you," ' The dread of pursuit did not 
permit him to stay in the office that day! " These stories, aside from 
their personal interest, show, to some extent at least, that the essay 
was conceived in the spirit of familiarity and written with that " effort- 
less effervescent zest " so characteristic of Elia. 



OLD CHINA — POPULAR FALLACIES 253 



Old China. London Magazine, March, 1823. (Pages 203-209)- 

Canon Ainger's remark on this essay is almost sufficient : "This 
beautiful essay tells its own story — this time, we may be sure, with- 
out romance or exaggeration of any kind. It is a contribution of singu- 
lar interest to our understanding of the happier days of Charles and 
Mary's united life." 

Mr. MacDonald makes the following entertaining note : — 

" One of the inmost of that inner circle of Lamb's works, those 
which bring us acquainted with the history of his own mind and cir- 
cumstances of his home life at certain periods. The period of which 
he speaks here — the very straitened years of his and Mary's house- 
keeping — is one which we must always regard with peculiar interest, 
with a curiosity that is begotten altogether of respect, and that will 
hardly presume to call itself sympathy. The essay is one which, on 
all accounts — for its humanity, its grace and graciousness, its knowl- 
edge of human nature, beyond the merely personal reference, and its 
sweet and perfect art — is worthy of the deepest attention and a thirty- 
times perusal." 

205. Islington. On September 2, 1823, Lamb wrote to Bernard 
Barton : " When you come Londonward you will find me no longer at 
Covent Garden; I have a cottage at Colebrook Row, Islington; a 
cottage, for it is detached; a white house with six good rooms; the 
New River (rather elderly by this time) runs (if a moderate walking 
pace can be so termed) close to the foot of the house; and behind is a 
spacious garden with vines (I assure you), pears, strawberries, pars- 
nips, leeks, carrots, cabbages, to delight old Alcinous." 

In September, 1827, the Lambs took a house at Enfield on Chase 
Side. To Tom Hood he wrote: " 'Twas with some pain we were 
evuls'd from Colebrook. You may find some of our flesh sticking to 
the door-posts. To change habitations is to die to them ; and in my 
time I have died seven deaths." To Henry Crabb Robinson : " I am 
settled for life I hope at Enfield. I have taken the prettiest, com- 
pactest house I ever saw." 

But the Lambs were to move once more. In 1832 they went to Bay 
Cottage, Edmonton, where Charles died. 



Popular Fallacies. ]S/'eio Monthly Magazine, January to Septem- 
ber, 1826. (Pages 209-226.) 

"Lamb writes to Wordsworth in 1833, when the volume was newly 
out : ' I want you in the Popular Fallacies to like the ' ' home that is 
no home," and " rising with the lark." ' The first of these essays natu- 
rally interested Lamb deeply, for it contains a hardly-disguised account 
of his own struggles with the crowd of loungers and good-natured friends 



254 NOTES 

who intruded in his leisure hours, and hindered his reading and writ- 
ing." — Ainger. 

" They are a sort of rapid rdsum^ and march-past of the qualities 
which have been at play throughout the two volumes of Elia, and 
have the same effect here at the close of the hook as that mustering of 
all the characters upon the stage at the end of the drama, nobody 
having anything very important to say, but their totality of presence 
making for remembrance and for good-humor and good-night." — 
MacDonald. 

The original number of the " fallacies " was sixteen. 

"That the Worst Puns are the Best." 

" Gary's account of a punning contest after Lamb's own heart makes 
the company vie with each other in puns on the names of herbs. After 
anise, mint, and other words had been ingeniously perverted, Lamb's 
own turn, the last, was reached, and it seemed impossible that anything 
was left for him. He hesitated. ' Now then, let us have it,* cried the 
others, all expectant. 'Patience,' he replied; 'it's c-c-cumin.' " — 
Lucas. 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 

JEgon. A shepherd in Vergil's Eclogues and in Theocritus' pas- 
torals. 

Agathocles. Ruler of Syracuse from 316 b.c. to 288 b.c. His father 
was a potter. 

Agur's wish. " Remove far from me vanity and lies ; give me neither 
poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me." — 
Proverbs xxx. 8. 

Alcibiades (450-404 b.c). An Athenian statesman and general. He 
was a pupil of Socrates, from whom he must have learned much of 
his wisdom, but from whom he certainly never learned his profli- 
gacy and willfulness. 

Alexander (356-323 b.c.) "the Great." King of Macedon; son of 
Philip of Macedon. He wept when he could find no new worlds 
to conquer. 

Alice W n. Alice Winterton, according to Lamb's key, but anno- 
tated by Lamb as " feigned." Her real name was Ann Simmons, a 
Hertfordshire girl who was Lamb's boyhood sweetheart from about 
1792 to 1796. He sang her praise in some of his sonnets and in his 
essays "New Year's Eve," " Blakesmoor," and "Dream-Chil- 
dren," and, according to local tradition, he made her the heroine 
of his Rosamund Graij. Although Lamb says twice that he wooed 
her for seven years, it is not at all evident that his suit was as 
pronounced and determined as his fancy. Alice or Ann married 
Mr. Bartrum, a pawnbroker in Princes Street. 

Althea's horn. Jupiter, who was rescued from the fate of being swal- 
lowed by Cronus, was fed in concealment on the milk of the goat 
Almathea. Breaking off one of the horns of the goat, Jupiter gave 
it to his nurses, the daughters of Melisseus, a Cretan king, and 
endowed it with the power of giving forth whatever the possessor 
wished. 

Ambrose (340-397 a.d.). A father of the Latin early Church; bishop 
of Milan. 

Amiens. A character in As You Like It, who sings a song in the for- 
est of Arden. Of. A. Y. L. I. II. 7. 174. 

Amlet, Esq., Richard. A character in Sir John Vanbrugh's comedy, 
The Confederacy, who is a " sad scapegrace." 

Amphitrites. Amphitrite was the wife of Neptune, the god of the 
sea. 

255 



256 EXPLANATORY INDEX 

Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) . A book by Robert Burton (1576-1640) , 
an English divine. The seventeenth century was preeminently an 
age of preaching. Theology and controversial literature held the 
fore rank. Burton, probably better than any other writer of the 
time, expresses the widespread national mood of melancholy, its 
causes, its manifestations, and its cure. His Anatomy is the 
result of his curious investigations of all " the out-of-the-way 
learning and the dreamy speculation of fifty years of recluse life at 
Brasenose College, Oxford. So curious a mixture of pedantry, im- 
agination, and quiet, brooding humor, covering in a sense the whole 
life and thought of man, could hardly have been produced in any 
other era of English literature." Lamb, who called Burton a " fan- 
tastic great old man," was powerfully influenced by him. 

Anderton's. A coffee-house in Fleet Street, London, now Anderton's 
Hotel. The portrait of which Lamb speaks is not now in evidence 
— if, indeed, it ever existed. 

Andrewes, Bishop. Launcelot Andrews (1555-1626) a theological 
writer and a member of the commission appointed by King James 
to make the" Authorized" translation of the Bible, which ap- 
peared in 1611. 

Anglicanas or Metropolitanas. Forerunners of ths Encyclopxdia 
Britannica. 

Aquinas, Saint Thomas. See Holy Thomas. 

Arcadia. The imaginary land of happy pastoral delights, and of ideal 
rustic peace, simplicity, and joy. 

Ariel. In Shakespeare's Tempest, I. 2. 196 : 

" Now on the beak, 
Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin, 
I flamed amazement." 

Arion. A musician of Lesbos. The legend goes that Arion, who was 
on a voyage from Corinth to Lesbos, was threatened with robbery 
and death by the sailors. He begged to play one more melody ; 
the sweetness of the song attracted a school of dolphins, and Arion 
jumped on the back of one which carried him to the shore. 

Arthur, The young Arthur in Shakespeare's King John, IV. 2. "In 
Crabb Robinson's diary. Miss Kelly relates that when, as Constance 
in King John, Mrs. Siddons (not Mrs. Porter) wept over her, her 
collar was wet with Mrs. Siddons' s tears. Miss Kelly, of course, 
was playing Arthur." — Lucas. 

Artist Evangelist. St. Luke, the patron saint of painters and physi- 
cians. 

Arundel Castle. The seat of the Dukes of Norfolk in Sussex. The 
family name is Howard. 

A's (" my friend "). William Ayrton (1777-1858), a musical critic and 
a correspondent of Lamb's. 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 257 

Ascapart. A giant, thirty feet high, who was conquered by Bevis of 
Southampton. His story is told in the old romance, Bevis of 
Hampton, and he is alluded to very often in literature. Cf. Dray- 
ton's Polyolbion, Song II. 

Ash Wednesday. The first day in Lent, when the sign of the cross 
was made on the forehead by priests, with ashes from consecrated 
palms. 

Aubert, Peter. Probably the assistant-secretary of the East India 
Company, although the assistant-secretary of the company at 
the time Lamb wrote the "Christ's Hospital" essay was named 
Auber. The name may be, thinks Mr. Lucas, a joke. 

Austin. St. Augustine (d. 430), bishop of Hippo, in Africa, who 
contended that all unbaptized infants were utterly lost. Author 
of the City of God, and of the Confessions. 

B . Bosanquet, a fictitious name. In " The Superannuated Man." 

S . Braham (born Abraham) , John (1774-1856). A popular tenor 

and composer. Lamb in a letter to Manning says, "He was a 
rare composition of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel; yet 
all these elements mixed up so kindly in him, that you could not 
tell which preponderated." Lamb in "Imperfect Sympathies" 
refers to his singing in Handel's oratorio " Israel in Egypt." Else- 
where Lamb speaks of him as " the brave little Jew." 

B , Martin. Martin Charles Burney, the son of Admiral Burney, 

was an unsuccessful London lawyer. He died in 1852. He was 
a lifelong friend of the Lambs. In " Detached Thoughts on 
Books and Reading." 

Bach, Johann Sebastian (1685-1750). A German composer of sacred 
music. 

Bacon, Friar. Roger Bacon (1214-1294) was a learned English philoso- 
pher. His greatest work is the Opus Magnus. His advanced 
ideas in science led many to look upon him as a wizard. 

Baddeley, Robert (1733-1794). An English actor who made the initial 
appearance of Moses in Sheridan's The School for Scandal. 

Balclutha. In the " South-Sea House," Lamb in a footnote misquotes 
the line referred to ; it should read, " I have seen the walls of 
Balclutha, and they were desolate." Couthon was one of the 
tales written by James Macpherson (1738-1796) , a Highland school- 
master, and ascribed by him to Ossian, a Gaelic poet and warrior 
of the third century. 

Bannister, Jack (1760-1836). An English comedian, more justly 
celebrated in the parts of Bob Acres, Sir Anthony Absolute, and 
Tony Lumpkin, than in the parts depicting a coward. 

Banyan days. Vegetarian days. The term is derived from the Banians, 
the Hindoos in Western India, whose rules of caste enjoin them 
to abstain from meat. The word was in common use among 



258 EXPLANATORY INDEX 



1 



sailors in tlie British navy, when originally there were two 

banyan days, and later only one. 
Barbara S . See Explanatory Notes to essay entitled "Barbara 

S ," page 251. 

Barbican. A street in London where Milton lived (1646-1647) while 

he was Latin-secretary under Cromwell, and where he wrote 

some of his sonnets. 
Barker's. An old bookshop at 20 Great Russell Street, now Russell 

Street. Lucas says that Lamb, in 1817, went to live over this shop, 

but it was no longer a bookshop. 
Barons. A baron of beef is two sirloins not cut asunder. 
Barrington, Daines (1727-1800). A lawyer and naturalist. He is 

honored most to-day as the correspondent of Gilbert White, the 

author of The Natural History of Selborne. He was made a Welsh 

judge, but whether for his Account of Some Fishes in Wales or 

whether his treatise on Welsh fishes was due to his experiences 

as a Welsh judge, it is difficult to tell. He was a sound lawyer 

whose ample fortune permitted him to dabble in archaeology. 
Bartlemy (" holy ") . Bartholomew is the apostle called * ' Nathanael " 

by St. John the Evangelist. His day is August 24. According to 

tradition, he was flayed alive. 
Barton, Old. Thomas Barton became a Bencher in 1775, died in 1791. 

Bartrum. See Alice W n. 

Baskett Prayer-Book. A small, illustrated prayer-book published in 

1749 by T. Baskett, printer to King George II. 
Bastile. The state prison in Paris, the storming of which, on July 14, 

1789, was the beginning of the French Revolution. 
Bath Theatre. MacDonald, in his notes on "Barbara S ," says, 

that the incidents related in the essay did not happen at the 

Bath Theatre but at the Drury Lane; and that the treasurer's 

name was not Ravenscroft, but Peake. 
Bayes. A character in Buckingham's comedy, The Rehearsal, 1671. 

A pompous coxcomb. " His character was intended as a caricature 

of Dry den." 
Beattie, James (1735-1803). Professor of philosophy at Aberdeen, 

and author of Elements of Moral Science. He is probably best 

remembered by his poem " The Minstrel." 
Beaumont and Fletcher. Francis Beaumont (1584-1616) and John 

Fletcher (1579-1625) were literary friends and joint authors of 

many plays, among which are Philaster, The Maid's Tragedy, 

and The Knight of the Burning Pestle. 

B d Bow. Bedford Row in the Strand. 

Bedlam. A contraction of Bethlehem. The hospital of St. Mary of 

Bethlehem, founded in the thirteenth century, is now used as 

an asylum for the insane. 
Beethoven, Ludwig von (1770-1827). An Austrian composer of music. 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 259 

Bellarmine. Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino (1542-1621), an Italian 
divine, member of the Jesuit order; a theological controversialist. 

Bencher. One of the senior members of an Inn of Court, who constitute 
the body charged with the management of its affairs. 

Bi-geny. A pun on bigamy. It literally means, or suggests, two births. 

Bigod, Ealph. This is John Fenwick, editor of the Albion. His life 
is a tale of misfortunes, dissipation, debt, and ruin. He was one 
of Lamb's "friendly harpies." Lamb borrowed the name Bigod 
from the old family name of the Earls of Norfolk. 

Black Monday. Easter Monday, so called because " in the 34th (year) 
of Edward III (1360), the 14th of April, and the morrow after 
Easter-day, King Edward with his host lay before the city of 
Paris: which day was full of dark mist and hail, and so bitter 
cold that many men died on their horses' backs with the cold." — 
Stowe. Lamb, in "The Superannuated Man," means the begin- 
ning of another week's work at the office of the India House. 

Bland, Mrs. A well-known actress in the early nineteenth century. 

Blandy, Miss. " Miss Blandy, the daughter of an attorney at Henley, 
with good expectations from her father, attracted the attention of 
an adventurer, a certain Captain Cranstoun. The father disap- 
proved of the intimacy, and the Captain intrusted Miss Blandy 
with a certain powder which she administered to her father with a 
fatal result. Her defense was that she believed the powder to be 
of the nature of a love-philter, which would have the effect of 
making her father well-affected towards her lover. The defense 
was not successful, and Miss Blandy was found guilty of murder, 
and executed at Oxford in April, 1752." — Ainger. 

Bloomsbury. In London. Lamb never lived in Bloomsbury, although 
he writes in "The Two Races of Men" as if he had; at the 
time of his writing that essay he was living in rooms at 20 Great 
Russell Street, Covent Garden. 
"Blue-coat Boy, The Fortunate." A rather foolish romance, telling 
how a blue-coat boy marries a rich lady of rank. 

Blue-Coat boys. A Christ's Hospital boy wears, even to this day, a long 
blue coat girded at the loins with a leather belt, knee breeches of 
Russian duck, a yellow waistcoat, yellow worsted stockings, and a 
small black cap. This costume was originally the ordinary dress 
of the poorer boys in the school, but now it is worn by all. 
Bohadil. A character in Ben Jonson's Evenj Man in his Humour, an 

ignorant, cowardly man, who poses as a hero. 
Bodley, Sir Thomas (1545-1613). An English scholar and founder of 
the Bodleian Library of Oxford University. This library, one of 
the most famed in the world, contains thousands of valuable books, 
manuscripts, and coins. 
Boldero. Like the names of Lacy, Bosanquet, and Merryweather in 
" The Superannuated Man," Boldero is a fictitious name. 



260 EXPLANATORY INDEX 

Bond Street, Pall Mall, and Soho Square are in the " West End " of 

London, the fashionable shopping district. 

Bowles, William Lisle (1762-1850). An English clergyman and minor 
poet. He published an edition of Pope in 1806, which had suffi- 
cient merit, or lack of merit, to arouse a controversy between 
Campbell and Moore. But his main power lay in his sonnets, pub- 
lished in 1798, which exerted some influence on the early poetry of 
Coleridge, and gained the approval of Lamb. 

Boyer, Eev. James. " He became upper or head-master of Christ's in 
1777. For the better side of Boyer's qualifications as a teacher, 
see Coleridge's ' Biographia Literaria,' the passage beginning, * At 
school I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, 
though at the same time a very severe master.' Elsewhere Cole- 
ridge entirely confirms Lamb's and Leigh Hunt's accounts of 
Boyer's violent temper, and severe discipline. Lamb never 
reached the position of Grecian, but it is the tradition in Christ's 
Hospital that he was under Boyer's instructions some time before 
leaving school." — Ainger. 

•' Boyle, The Adventures of the Hon. Captain Robert." A book by 
W. R. Cheterode, 1726. " It was a blend of unconvincing and rather 
free narrative." 

Bridget. Bridget Elia, i.e. Mary Lamb. 

Brinsley. See Sheridan. 

Browne. Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) was the author of Hydrotaphia 
or Urn-Burial (1658) , his most characteristic work. It is an essay 
" suggested by the finding of some ancient Roman funeral urns 
buried in the earth in the neighborhood of Norwich. The Urn- 
Burial is ostensibly an inquiry into the various historic methods 
of disposing of the dead, but by implication it is a descant upon the 
vanity of earthly ambition, especially in its attempt to hand on 
mortal memory to future ages." 

Lamb constantly borrows from Browne, so much so, indeed, 
that it has been said, "no Browne, no Lamb" — a rather exag- 
gerated truth. 

Browne's Religio Medici, published in 1642, contains a confession 
of his own personal religious creed. In essence it is a mystical 
acceptance of Christianity. " Methinks," he says, " there be not 
impossibilities enough in religion for active faith. ... I love to 
lose myself in a mystery; to pursue my reason to an O Altitudo! " 
This is Browne's habitual mental attitude ; to lose himself in meta- 
physical speculation ; to climb to an altitude of spiritual exaltation, 
and yet to be filled with peace, quietude, and humility. Again he 
says: " Methinks I begin to be weary of the sun. . . . The world 
to me is but a dream and mock-show, and we are all therein but 
pantaloons and antics, to my severer contemplations." His tem- 
per was not the temper of the Elizabethans — a delight in the stir 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 



261 



and bustle of humanity, a love of versatility, enthusiasm, and 

spontaneity; nor was it of the temper of the clangor and rigidity 

of the Puritans; it 

was the temper of 

sweet quietude and 

sweet reasonableness. 
His Christian Mor- 
als was published in 

1716, thirty-four years 

after his death. 
Brunswick dynasty. This 

dynasty began with 

George I in 1714; 

George II came to the 

throne in 1727, and 

reigned until 1760. 
Bull, Bishop. George Bull, 

bishop of St. David's 

(1634-1710) , He is said 

to have had severe 

views on ecclesiasti- 
cal matters. 
Bull, William (1738-1814). 

Lord Mayor of London 

in 1773. He is remem- 
bered, also, as a friend 

of Cowper. 
Buncle, John. The Life 

of John Buncle, Esq., 

by Thomas Amory 

(1691?-1788), an Eng- 
lish humorist and mor- 
alist. The hero of the 

book is described as 

being " a prodigious 

hand at matrimony, 

divinity, a song, and 

a peck ! " He married 

seven times, and he 

tells us that " when 

one of his wives died he remained four days ' with his eyes shut ' ; 

on another similar occasion 'two days.'" The book was a great 

favorite with Lamb and Hazlitt. 
Burgoyne, John (c. 1722-1792) . The commander of the British forces 

in the American Revolution who surrendered to General Gates at 

Saratoga in 1777. 




The Rev. James Boyer and a Grecian 

Detail from the picture of St. Matthew's Day 

at Christ's Hospital, painted in 1799 

by T. Stothard, E.A. 



262 EXPLANATORY INDEX 



Burns, Eobert (1759-1796). The Scottish poet. Lamb once wrote to 
Coleridge, " Burns was the God of my idolatry." Barry Cornwall 
tells how sympathetically Lamb would repeat favorite lines from 
Burns's poetry, and how " Sometimes — in a way scarcely discern- 
ible — lie would kiss the volume; as he would also a book by 
Chapman or Sir Philip Sidney, or any other which he particularly 
valued." 

Burton, Richard. See Anatomy of Melancholy. 

C . Cambridge; so indicated in the essay "Oxford in the Vaca- 
tion." 

C. Lord. Thomas Pitt, second Baron Camelford (1775-1804). He was 
killed in 1804 in a duel with Mr. Best. His " conceit" was to be 
buried, according to his own directions, " on the borders of the lake 
of St. Lampierre, in the Canton of Berne (Switzerland) , and three 
trees stand in the particular spot." But his request could not be 
carried out, so he was buried in the vaults of St. Anne's, Soho, 
London. 

C, C ., S. T. C. All refer to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 

C. V. L. and C. V. Le G . ' ' Charles Valentine Le Grice and a younger 

brother of the name of Samuel were Grecians, and prominent 
members of the school in Lamb's day. They were from Cornwall. 
Charles became a clergyman, and held a living in his native coun- 
try. Samuel went into the army, and died in the West Indies. It 
was he who was staying in Loudon in the autumn of 1796, and 
showed himself a true friend to the Lambs at the season of the 
mother's death. Lamb writes to Coleridge, 'Sam Le Grice, who 
was then in town, was with me the three or four first days, and was 
as a brother to me ; gave up every hour of his time to the very 
hurting of his health and spirits in constant attendance, and 
humoring my poor father; talked with him, read to him, played 
at cribbage with him.' He was a 'mad wag,' according to Leigh 
Hunt, who tells some pleasant anecdotes of him, but must have 
been a good-hearted fellow. ' Le Grice the elder was a wag,' adds 
Hunt, ' like his brother, but more staid. He went into the church 
as he ought to do, and married a rich widow.' " 

Caesars (the twelve). The Roman emperors from Julius Csesar to 
Domitian. 

Caledonian. A Scotchman. Caledonia was the ancient Roman name 
for Scotland. 

Caliban. The half-human, half-monster son of the witch Sycorax, who 
serves Prospero, the magician, in Shakespeare's The Tempest. 

Caligula's minion. Incitatus, the favorite horse of the Roman Em- 
peror Caligula (ruled a.d. 37-41). The emperor made the horse a 
consul and high priest, housed him in a marble stable adorned 
with precious gems, and fed him gilded oats from a golden manger. 



1 

to 1' 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 263 

Calne in Wiltshire. This is a mystification for Ottery St. Mary in 
Devonshire, the early home of Coleridge. 

Cam. The river on which Cambridge is situated. Oxford is on the Isis. 

Cambro-Briton. Welshman. The Latin name for Wales was Cam- 
bria : the Britons were the native dwellers in England. 

" Candide." The title of a philosophical novel by Voltaire (1694-1778), 
the French satirist, which scoffs at Christianity. 

Candlemas. February 2, a feast day in honor of the purification of the 
Virgin Mary. In Scotland, Candlemas Day is one of the four 
quarter-days or term days, days when payment of rent or interest 
on account is due. Other quarter-days are Whitsunday, May 15; 
Lammas, August 1 ; Martinmas, November 11. The time of blessing 
candles. Contrary to Lamb's suggestion in " Rejoicings upon the 
New Year's Coming of Age," there are no ceremonies of washing at 
Candlemas. Lamb may have associated washing and purification. 

Canticles. Solomon's Canticle of Canticles, Song of Songs, viii. 8. 

Carlo Marratti. An Italian painter of Madonnas and other religious 
subjects; his works have small merit. 

Carmania. Carmania in classical mythology lay in Asia along the 
northern shore of the Persian Gulf. 

Carrachi. Three Italian painters of the Bolognese school : Annibale 
(1560-1609) ; Ludovico (1555-1619) ; and Agostine (1558-1602). 

Carthusian. An order of monks, founded in 1086 by St. Bruno, of 
Cologne, who, with six companions, retired to the solitude of La 
Chartreuse, near Grenoble, in France. Among the many austere 
rules of this severe order is the imperative rule of continual silence. 
The London Charterhouse (a corruption of Chartreuse) was one of 
the houses of the order (1371). 

Cat-cradles. A common amusement with children is the making of 
" cats' cradles " by interlacing a piece of string passed around the 
two hands and manipulated by the fingers. The hands with palms 
facing and slightly curved resemble the marks of parenthesis. 

Cathay. A name for China, or more properly Chinese Tartary, in the 
Middle Ages. 

Cave, Edward (1691-1754). The founder of the Gentleman's Magazine. 
It was Cave, not Plumer, who was summoned before the House 
of Commons, because he objected to granting a frank to the 
Duchess of Marlborough — a privilege given to her by Plumer. 
Cave was accused of opening letters to detect the user of the frank. 
Johnson defends Cave's action. 

Caxon. A rough, uncombed wig. An obsolete word. 

Cayster. A river in Ionia, famous for swans. 

Celseno. One of the Harpies. The Harpies, daughters of Neptune and 
Terra, were represented as winged monsters with the bodies of 
vultures, the faces of maidens, and claw-like hands. Their names 
were Celseno (blackness), Ocypeta (rapid), and Aello (storm). 



264 EXPLANATORY INDEX 

In Vergil's yiJneid, III, 247-257, Celseno utters prophetic denuncia- 
tions at ^neas and the Trojans who are gathered at a meal. The 
expression " those Virgilian fowl " in " Grace before Meat " refers 
to the Harpies. 

Celtic tribes. Literally those who inhabit the woods and wild fast- 
nesses ; as the Gaels of Scotland and Ireland and the Kymry of 
Wales. They belong to the great parent stock of Western and 
Southern Europe. They are described as volatile, fanciful; lovers 
of beauty, romance, and humor; with a touch for sentiment, and 
a love of natural magic. 

Cerinthus. A sectarian; a heretic who founded a sect which believed 
in a conglomeration of Judaism, Christianity, and Paganism. 

Ch . John Chambers, died 1872. An intimate friend of Lamb's. 

Cham of Tartary. The hereditary ruler of Tartar countries ; usually 
spelled Khan. In English literature the name is often used as 
synonymous with despot. 

Charles of Sweden. Charles XII of Sweden, who reigned from 1697 to 
1718. A soldier-king whom Johnson described in the Vanity of 
Hmnan Wishes: — 

*' He left the name at which the world grew pale, 
To paint a moral or adorn a tale." 

Chartreuse. The former chief monastery of the Carthusian monks, 
near Grenoble, France. 

Chatham, Earl of (1708-1778). William Pitt. He was a friend of the 
American colonists, and used his influence to bring about concilia- 
tion between the colonies and England. 

Chaucer, Geoffrey (1340-1400) . The first great English poet ; author 
of The Canterbury Tales. Lamb takes a liberty when he suggests 
that Chaucer may have studied at Oxford. There is no evidence 
whatever that Chaucer ever studied at either Oxford or Cambridge. 

Child of the Green-room. Actor. The greenroom is the retiring-room 
in a theater. 

Children in the Wood. The title of an ancient ballad, included in 
Percy's Reliqites of Ancient English Poetry. The three-year-old 
son of a Norfolk gentleman and a baby sister were left orphans in 
the care of an uncle. In order to secure their inheritance the 
uncle hired two ruffians to kill them. One of these fellows repented 
of his bargain sufficiently to murder his comrade, but he left the 
children alone in the wood. There they perished, and "Robin 
Redbreast" covered them with leaves. The cruel uncle met with 
various ill-fortunes and died in jail ; and the ruffian later confessed 
to bis share in the crime. 

A comedy with the same title was written* by Thomas Morton 
(1769-18.38). 

Christie's and Phillip's. Auctioneers of paintings and antiquarian 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 265 

objects of art in Pall Mall, a famous street in London. The 
younger Christie was also an art critic and author of reputation. 
Thomas Phillips (1770-1845) was an English painter of note. 

Christ's. Christ's Church College is " reverend " because it was origi- 
nally a cathedral. It was founded by Cardinal Wolsey in 1525 and 
completed by Henry VIII. It is one of the most beautiful, most 
fashionable, and most important colleges in the world. 

Christ's HospitaL The Blue-Coat School, in London, was founded by 
Edward VI, in 1553, as a hospital for orphans and foundlings. 
For nearly three hundred and fifty years it was situated between 
Newgate Street, Giltspur Street, St. Bartholomew's, and Little 
Britain; but in May, 1902, the school was removed to Horsham, in 
Sussex, and the old building was demolished. 

Originally no child was admitted before he was eight or after he 
was ten years of age, and none could remain after he was fifteen, 
except "King's Boys," who attended the mathematical school 
founded by Charles II in 1672, and " Grecians " (the highest or honor 
class, of whom five are sent on scholarships to the universities). 
Some of these conditions are now changed. See Blue-coat boys. 

The memory of Lamb and Coleridge is not forgotten at Christ's. 
There is a Coleridge Memorial, a statuette representing Coleridge, 
Lamb, and Middleton, which is held by the Ward in the school 
winning the most prizes during the year. The statuette shows the 
boy Coleridge holding a book, which he is translating or explain- 
ing to Lamb and Middleton. This memorial grew out of the story 
which tells how Middleton one day finding the " young Mirandula " 
reading Vergil on the playground, asked him if it were a task. 
Coleridge replied that it was a pleasure. Middleton told the 
Master, Boyer, who at once took an active interest in Coleridge. 
The memorial of Lamb is a medal, which was first struck in 1875 
on the centenary of Lamb's birth, and which is awarded every 
year to the boy who writes the best English essay. It is a pleas- 
ure to know that two of the new schoolhouses at Horsham are 
called after Lamb. 

Cinque Ports. The five port towns — Hastings, Romney, Hythe, Dover, 
and Sandwich — on the English Channel. 

Clarkson, Thomas (1760-1846). An English abolitionist, and a friend 
of Lamb's. The quotation, " true yoke-fellow with Time," is from 
Wordsworth's sonnet to Clarkson. 

Claude. Claude Lorrain (1600-1682), a famous French painter of 
landscapes. 

Clifford's Inn. One of the London Inns of Court ; the abode of lawyers. 
It was founded as a law school in the time of Edward III (1327- 
1377). It is now abolished. 

Clinton, Sir Henry (1738-1795) . The successor of Howe as commander- 
in-chief of the British forces in America in 1778. 



266 EXPLANATORY INDEX 

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834). A poet, critic, and philosopher. 
He was the youngest child of a pedantic, lovable rector at Ottery 
St. Mary, Devonshire. Left an orphan, he was sent to the great 
charity school, Christ's Hospital, in his tenth year, and " began 
his long, unequal fight of life." He was a dreamer; he had a 
hopelessly erratic nature, and yet he had the marks of a titanic 
genius. Asa boy in Devon he would wander over the fields slash- 
ing the tops off weeds, under the spell of imagination that he was 
one of the " Seven Champions of Christendom " ; at Christ's Hos- 
pital he would watch the drifting clouds or read Vergil on the 
playground ; and in the busy Strand in London he would, with 
tiying arms, imagine himself Leander swimming the Hellespont. 
This boy, with his vivid imagination, made as enduring contribu- 
tions to English literature as anything in the language. His 
Ancient Mariner, Christahel, Kuhla Khan, his lectures on Shake- 
speare, fragments though they are, and his Table Talk, are among 
the glories of English literature. 

Colnaghi. A collector and seller of engravings, prints, and autographs 
in Cockspur Street. 

Colossus of Rhodes. A colossal statue of Apollo at Rhodes. It never 
straddled the harbor; consequently ships could not pass between 
its huge legs. 

Comberbatcli. Coleridge. Silas Titus Comberbatch was the name 
assumed by Coleridge when he enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoons 
in 1793. *' Being at a loss when suddenly asked my name, I an- 
swered Comberback; and, verily, my habits were so little eques- 
trian, that my horse, I doubt not, was of that opinion." 

Commoner, Gentleman. A rich student who, by paying extra fees, was 
permitted to indulge in special liberties such as dining with the 
officials and wearing a special academic gown. 

Complete Angler. A book by Izaak Walton (159^^1683). Walton was 
a London shopkeeper who spent his days roaming along the streams 
with a fishing-rod and basket, collecting odd bits of information 
about the unspoiled ways of nature. His Complete Angler, pub- 
lished in 1G53, is one of the sweetest and most untroubled books 
ever written. 

Lamb is ever praising this book. Writing to Coleridge, he says: 
" I have just be-n reading a book, which I may be too partial to, 
as it was the delight of my childhood ; but I will recommend it to 
you — it is Izaak AValton's Co mp^e^e -4?i5r^er.' . . . The dialogue is 
very simple, full of pastoral beauties, and will charm you." 

Elsewhere he says: "It breathes the very spirit of innocence, 

purity, and simplicity of heart, ... it would sweeten a man's temper 

at any time to read it; it would Christianize every discordant 

angry passion ; pray make yourself acquainted with it." 

Again, he calls this book " so old a darling of mine." And to 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 267 

Wordsworth: " Izaak Walton hallows any page in which his 
revered name appears." 
Comus. A masque in verse by John Milton ; it was performed at Lud- 
low Castle in Wales in 1634. 
Comus. The evil spirit in Milton's poem of that name, who, like his 
mother Circe, the enchantress, could transform human beings into 
swine. 
Conduit in Cheap. A cistern of lead erected in 1285 for holding water 
brought underground from Paddingtori. In times of public fes- 
tivity wine sometimes took the place of water. 
Confucius. A Chinese philosopher and teacher (550-478 b.c). Lamb's 
reference to the Mundane Mutations of Confucius is merely 
whimsical. Cho-fang, according to Messrs. Hallward and Hill, 
may refer to Ch'u-fang, a Chinese word for cook-house. 
Cornwall, Barry. The assumed name of Bryan Waller Procter (1790- 
1874). He was an intimate friend of Lamb's and wrote, in his old 
age, a memoir of Lamb. As a poet of the sea he has had some 
fame. Lamb in " Witches and Other Night Fears " refers to Corn- 
wall's poem, " A Dream," telling of a stormy sea-scene : — 
" Me thought one told me that a child 
Was that night unto great Neptune born ; 
And then old Triton blew his curled horn, 
And the Leviathan lashed the foaming seas, 
And the wanton Nereides 
Came up like phantoms from their coral halls, 
And laughed like tipsy Bacchanals, 
Till all the fury of the ocean broke 
Upon my ear. — I trembled and awoke." 

Cotton. Charles Cotton (1630-1687), a very minor English poet, who 
added a second part to Walton's Complete Angler. In "Old 

China " Lamb quotes from Cotton's poem " The New Year " : 

" Then let us welcome the new guest 
With lusty brimmers of the best." 

Coventry, Thomas. He became a Bencher of the Inner Temple in 1766, 
was a sub-governor of the South-Sea House, and died in 1797, aged 
eighty-six. He had a country home at North Cray Place, Bexley 
in Kent. ' 

Cowley, Abraham (1618-1667). An English poet and essayist. The 
themes which in essay-writing interested Cowley are shown by 
some of his titles: " Of Greatness," "Of Myself," " Of Liberty," 
"Of Solitude," "The Garden." He was a Cavalier poet, a fol- 
lower of the Royal party as Milton was a follower of the Puritan 
party; but unlike some of the Royal poets, who are remarkable 
for ease and grace, Cowley as a poet is marked by heaviness and 
cumbersomeness. 



26S EXPLANATORY INDEX 

Cribbage-board. Used in playing cribbage, a two-handed game at 
cards. There are one hundred and twenty holes, sixty holes on 
each side, into which small ivory pegs, one white and one red, are 
stuck and advanced as the game progresses. A " go " in cribbage 
is cried when by playing a card the player raises the score above 
thirty-one. The " nob " is scoring by playing the knave of 
trumps. If a knave happens to be the " turn-up," the dealer takes 
" two lor his heels." A cribbage-board is often used in counting 
the points in whist. 

Croesus. The last and most renowned of the kings of Lydia. His gold 
mines and tributes from the Greek cities made him the richest 
monarch of his times, so we have the proverb " rich as Croesus." 

Crug. A slang word, still in use, applied by Christ's Hospital boys to 
bread. 

Cyclops. " The three Cyclopes represented the terrors of rolling thun- 
der, of the lightning flash, and of the thunderbolt." One fiery eye 
was deemed enough for each of them. They assisted Vulcan at 
his forge. 

Cyril (d. 444). A father of the early Greek Church. It was he who 
" encouraged the tumult which led to the death of Hypatia." 

Cythera. A Grecian island sacred to Venus, who emerged from the 
sea-foam there. 

Dagon. The god, half man and half fish, worshiped by the Philistines. 
Cf. Judges xvi. 23 and 1 Samuel v. 

Damascus ("waters of"). Naaman was commanded by Elisha to 
wash in the Jordan, that his leprosy might be cleansed away. 
Naaman, however, was wroth at the command, sajnng, " Are 
not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the 
waters of Israel? May I not wash in them and be clean ? " 

Damoetas. A shepherd in Vergil's Eclogues. 

Dan Phoebus. Apollo. Dan, in Old English, was applied as a title of 
honor to men. Latterly it was applied in a jocular way. 

Daniel. The Old Testament prophet, who as a boy was taken captive 
to Babylon about 606 B.C. Here he interpreted the dreams of 
Nebuchadnezzar, and rose to fame. As a prophet he foretold a 
succession of great historical events. 

Daniel, Samuel (1562-1619). A poet, dramatist, and prose writer; 
author of The Complaiyit of Rosamand, Hymen's Triumph, The 
Civil Wars between the Two Houses of York and Lancaster. 
Saintsbury says, " The poetical value of Daniel may almost be 
summed up in two words — sweetness and dignity. Nothing is 
more agreeable to him than to moralize ; not indeed in any dull 
or crabbed manner, but in a mellifluous and at the same time 
weighty fashion, of which very few others have the secret." One 
can readily imagine Lamb's affection for such a writer. It was 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 269 

Lamb's copy of Daniel's Poetical Works, two volumes, 1718, "which 
Coleridge carried off, but returned enriched with marginal notes. 

Dante (1265-1321). The greatest Italian poet. His great poem. The 
Divine Comedy, an epic poem in three parts — the Inferno, the 
Purgatorio, and the Paradiso — treats of the penalties of sin, 
purification of sin, and the blessings of the redeemed in heaven. 
The disfigurements of Dante mentioned in the "Christ's Hospital " 
essay refer to Dante's Inferno, Cantos xxviii-xxx, in which several 
notorious sinners are described in extreme agony of punishment, 
having their bodies horribly mutilated : one carries his own dis- 
severed head, another is severed from head to foot, and others are 
equally grewsome to sight and sense. 

Dante's lovers. Paolo and Francesca in the fifth canto of the Inferno. 

Dead-letter days. Days that are not marked by any special claim for 
observance ; disregarded like an unclaimed letter. 

Debates. The debates in Parliament as reported in the newspapers. 

De Clifford. An ancient English family that traces its ancestry back 
to the twelfth century. Lamb, in his " South-Sea House " essay, 
alludes to the story of Jane Clifford under the name of "Fair 
Rosamond." 

Defoe, Daniel (1661-1731). Author of Robinson Crusoe. In his pamph- 
let, The Shortest Way with Dissenters, he ironically advised the 
severest punishment for those persons who did not conform to the 
form of worship established by the Church of England. For a time 
he was able to conceal his authorship, but finally his trick was 
discovered. He was placed in a pillory and then imprisoned. Pope 
was incorrect in saying that he stood "earless" in the pillory. 
That he stood " unabashed " is true, for he was a popular hero; 
the admiring crowd decorated the pillory with garlands of flowers. 

Delectable Mountains. In Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. "These 
mountains are Immanuel's Land, and they are within sight of his 
city " {i.e. the Celestial City). Knowledge, Experience, Watchful, 
and Sincere are the shepherds of the mountains. 

Delphic voyages. Voyages to the oracle at Delphi, at the foot of 
Mount Parnassus. 

Derwentwater, House of. The earls of Derwentwater were zealous 
supporters of Stuart rulers, and were unfortunate in that they had 
to suffer for their loyalty. James Radcliffe (1689-1716), the third 
earl, was beheaded in 1716 for his share in the rebellion of 1715. 
Another member of the house was summarily dealt with for com- 
plicity in the uprising of 1745. 

Desdemona. The wife of the Moor, Othello, in Shakespeare's Othello. 

" That I did love the Moor to live with him. 
My downright violence and storm of fortunes 
May trumpet to the world." — Act I. 3. 249-251. 



270 EXPLANATORY INDEX 

Deyil's Litany. Some devilish form of prayer. A litany is a solemn 
form of supplication used in public worship. The clergyman reads 
the petition and the congregation responds. 

Dewesbury, William. An associate and co-worker with George Fox. 

Dido (" hall of"). The place where ^Eneas studied the pictures illus- 
trating the Trojan War. The " hall " was the temple which Dido 
was erecting to Juno, ^neas " feeds his soul on the bodiless pre- 
sentment " — Animum pictura pascit inani : JEneid, I, 464. 

Dido. The queen of Carthage who killed herself for love of ^neas. 
The story is told in Vergil's JEneid, Books I and II. 

Diogenes. A Greek cynic philosopher of the fourth century B.C., who 
searched Corinth with a lantern to find an honest man. 

Dis. Pluto, the god of the under-world. Proserpine, while she was 
gathering flowers in the vale of Enna, in Sicily, and playing with 
the Loves, or Cupides, was carried off by Pluto to become his con- 
sort in Hades. The Loves fled at the appearance of grim-visaged 
Pluto. 

Dives. The rich man who, when he died, looked up from hell to heaven, 
where he saw Lazarus, the beggar, in the bosom of Abraham. Cf. 
Luke xvi. 19-31. 

Do . Henry Dodwell, a clerk in the India House. 

Dodd, James William (1740-1796). An English actor in minor parts. 

Dodsley's dramas. Robert Dodsley (1703-1764) in 1744 published A 
Select Collection of Old Plays. Lamb was familiar with the Col- 
lection, as he used it in preparing his Specimens of the English 
Dramatic Poets. 

Domenichino. An Italian painter (1581-1641) . 

Dorrell, William. One of the witnesses to the will of John Lamb, the 
father of Charles. Lamb, in his poem entitled "Epicadium (Going 
or Gone) " (which really means a funeral dirge), speaks of "wicked 
old Dorrell, 'gainst whom I have a quarrel," and in a suppressed 
stanza in the same poem he refers to Dorrell suffering " amid the 
dark Powers " where *' will-forgers " are punished. 

Drajrton, Michael (1563-1631). Author of Polyolhion, a poem describ- 
ing England and Wales. An epitaph, attributed to Ben Jonson, 
proclaims him as the possessor of "a name that cannot fade." 
His poem. The Battle of Agincourt, is one of the most stirring 
martial lyrics in the English language. 

Drummond, William (1583-1649). Of Hawthornden, near Edinburgh ; 
a poet and author of Notes on Ben Jonfton's Conversations. 

Duncan. King of Scotland in Shakespeare's Macbeth. 

Dunning. John (1731-1783). Counsel for Wilkes at his trial for libel. 
^ee Wilkes. Dunning was subsequently created Earl of Ashburton. 

Dyer, George (G. D.) (1755-1841). "Educated at Christ's Hospital and 
Emmanuel College, Cambridge. A compiler and editor and gen- 
eral worker for the booksellers, shortsighted, absent-minded, and 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 271 

simple, for whom Lamb had a lifelong affection. He compiled, 
among other books, a History of the Universitij and Colleges of 
Cambridge, and contributed the original matter (preface excepted) 
to Valpy's edition of the Classics. The account of him given in 
Crabb Robinson's Diary well illustrates Lamb's frequent refer- 
ences to this singular character. ' He was one of the best crea- 
tures, morally, that ever breathed. He was the son of a watchman 
in Wapping, and was put to a charity school by some pious Dis- 
senting ladies. ... He was a scholar, but to the end of his days 
(and he lived to be eighty-iive) was a bookseller's drudge. He 
led a life of literary labor in poverty. He made indexes, corrected 
the press, and occasionally gave lessons in Latin. ... He wrote 
one good book. The Life of Robert Robinson, which I have heard 
Wordsworth mention as one of the best works of biography in the 
language. . . . Dyer had the kindest heart and simplest manners 
imaginable. It was literally the case with him that he would give 
away his last guinea. . . . Not many years before his death he 
married his laundress, by the advice of his friends — a very worthy 
woman. He said to me once, " Mrs. Dyer is a woman of excellent 
natural sense, but she is not literate." That is, she could neither 
read nor write. Dyer was blind for a few years before his death. 
I used occasionally to go on a Sunday morning to read to him. 
. . . After he came to London, Dyer lived always in some very 
humble chambers in Clifford's Inn, Fleet Street.' " — Ainger. 

E. B. Edward Francis Burney (1760-1848). A portrait painter and 
book illustrator of much note in his day. He illustrated the 
Arabian Nights and the novels of Richardson and Smollett. He 
was a cousin of Madame D'Arblay (Frances Burney), who wrote 
one of the most delightful Diaries in the English language. 

Eastcheap. Formerly the chief market-place in East London. 

Easter anthems. Hymns composed for Easter, the time for celebrat- 
ing the resurrection of Christ from the dead. " These were also 
sometimes written by the boys." — Lucas. 

Ebion. A sectarian of the first century ; a heretic who was the founder 
of the Ebionites, believers in a mixed creed: some following the 
belief of Christianity, and others denying Christ as a divinity. 

Elgin marbles. Among the finest specimens of Greek sculpture. They 
formed originally part of the decorations of the Parthenon, but 
were brought to London by the Earl of Elgin, who subsequently 
sold them to the British government. 

Elia. Lamb's pseudonym. Lamb first used this name as a signature 

for his essay " The South-Sea House " published in the London 

Magazine, August, 1820. How he procured the name is best told 

in his letter to John Taylor, July 30, 1821. 

" Poor Elia, the real (for I am but a counterfeit), is dead. The 



272 EXPLANATORY INDEX 

fact is, a person of that name, an Italian, was a fellow-clerk of 
mine at the South-Sea House, thirty (not forty) years ago, when 
the characters I described there existed, but had left it like myself 
many years ; and I having a brother now there, and doubting how 
he might relish certain descriptions in it, I clapt down the name 
of Elia to it, which passed off pretty well, for Elia himself added 
the function of an author to that of a scrivener, like myself. 

" I went the other day (not having seen him for a year) to laugh 
over with him at my usurpation of his name, and found him, alas! 
no more than a name, for he died of consumption eleven months 
ago, and I knew not of it. So the name has fairly devolved to me, 
I think; and 'tis all he has left me." 

In the same letter Lamb says, " Poor Elia (call him Ell'ia) " 
— thus indicating the pronunciation, but as Canon Ainger says, 
*' the world has taken more kindly to the broad e and single Z." 

Mr. Lucas notes that Mrs. Cowden Clarke in her copy of Proc- 
ter's Memoir of Lamh records in a marginal note that Lamb once 
remarked that "Elia" formed an anagram of "a lie." Lamb 
once wrote himself down as a " matter-of-lie man." 

Elia, Bridget. Mary Lamb, who is met in " Mrs. Battle," " My Rela- 
tions," " Mackery End," and " Old China." 

Elia, James. John Lamb, the elder brother of Charles. 

Elwes, John (171'Jr-1789). A noted English miser, member of a family 
of misers. He spent money freely on charities and gambling, but 
provided scantily for his personal necessities. 

Elysian exemptions. The privileges of heaven. Elysium was the 
heaven, the place of happy spirits, in the mythology of the Greeks. 

Emmanuel. A college at Cambridge ; the stronghold of Puritanism. 

Ember Days. '' These are the Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays 
after the first Sunday in Lent, the Feast of Pentecost, Holyrood 
Day (September 14), and St. Lucia's Day (December 15). They 
mark the return of the seasons, and have no connection with 
ashes." 

Emery, Mr. "John Emery (1777-1822), the best impersonator of 
countrymen in his day." — Lucas. 

Enfield. Ten miles north of London in Middlesex. Potter's Bar and 
Waltham, mentioned in " Old China," are fourteen and twelve 
miles respectively north of London. 

"Enraged Musician, The." A "picture drama " by Hogarth {q.v.), 
depicting a musician enraged and tormented by the pandemonium 
of street noises. 

Ephesian journeyman. Demetrius, a silversmith of Ephesus, who 
raised a riot against Paul and the Christians because their belief 
interfered with the making of silver shrines for the worship of the 
goddess Artemis. Cf. Acts xix. 24-41. 

Epiphanous. See Epiphany. 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 273 

Epiphany. The word literally means " a striking appearance, a mani- 
festation " ; it has reference to the period when the star appeared 
to the wise men of the East. This feast falls on January 6, twelve 
days after Christmas, and was called Twelfth Day. The date, of 
course, falls on various days in various years and occasionally on 
Sunday, in which case there would be no holiday, — which consti- 
tutes these " periodical " misfortunes. 

Erra Pater. An astrologer. Astrologers in former times were wise in 
affairs of the almanac. 

Essex Street. There the aunt mentioned in *' My Relations " attended 
the Unitarian service. Lamb for a time was a member of the sect, 
but finally dropped all ostensible religious connections. 

Eton. A famous school founded in 1440 by King Henry the Sixth, at 
Eton, across the Thames River from Windsor Castle. 

Evans, William. A cl«k in the South-Sea House who became deputy- 
cashier in 1792. 

Evelyn, John (1620-1706) . A writer on many diverse themes, but chiefly 
remembered and read to-day for his Diary. Lamb in " Imperfect 
Sympathies" refers to Evelyn's Acetaria : A Discourse of Sallets, 
a part of Evelyn's book on gardening. 

F . Joseph Favell, afterward Captain, was killed at Salamanca 

in 1812, in the Peninsular campaign. In '* Poor Relations " Lamb 
writes of Favell under the initial " W.," and says he was killed 
at San Sebastian. His epitaph in Great St. Andrew's Church 
gives his first name as Samuel. 

" Fairy Queen." By Edmund Spenser (g. v.) 

Falstaff, Sir John. A fat, witty, and dissolute old knight in Shake- 
speare's Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV. 

Farquhar, George (1678-1707). A comic dramatist ; author of The 
Beaux' Stratagem and other rollicking plays. 

Fasces. Rod of office, i.e. in school language, the birch-rod. The 
fasces, a bundle of rods with an ax in the middle, were carried 
before the magistrates of Rome as a symbol of their authority. 

Fernandez, Juan. The island where Alexander Selkirk, the hero of 
Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, was wrecked. 

Field, Barron. Born October 23, 1786. "He was educated for the 
Bar and practiced for some years, going the Oxford Circuit. In 
1816 he married, and went out to New South Wales as Judge of 
the Supreme Court at Sydney. In 1824 he returned to England, 
having resigned his judgeship; but two or three years afterwards 
he was appointed Chief-Justice of Gibraltar. He died at Torquay 
in 1846. His brother, Francis John Field, was a fellow-clerk of 
Charles Lamb's at the India House, a circumstance which was 
perhaps the origin of the acquaintance. Barron Field edited a 
volume of papers {Geographical Memoirs) on New South Wales 



274 EXPLANATORY INDEX 

for Murray, and the appendix contains some short poems, 
entitled ' First Fruits of Australian Poetry.' Some papers of 
his are to be found in Leigh Hunt's Reflector, to which Lamb also 
contributed." — Ainger. 

Field, Rev. Matthew. Master of the Lower Grammar School of 
Christ's Hospital. The following note from Leigh Hunt's Auto- 
biography is interesting as revealing something of the man : — 

*' A man of a more handsome incompetence for his situation 
perhaps did not exist. He came late of a morning; went away 
soon in the afternoon ; and used to walk up and down, languidly 
bearing his cane, as if it were a lily, and hearing our eternal 
* Dominuses ' and ' As in prsesentis ' with an air of ineffable en- 
durance. Often he did not hear at all. It was a joke with us 
when any of our friends came to the door, and we asked his per- 
mission to go to them, to address him with some preposterous 
question wide of the mark, to which he used to assent. We 
would say, for instance, ' Are you not a great fool, sir ? ' or ' Isn't 
your daughter a pretty girl ? ' to which he would reply, ' Yes, 
child.' When he condescended to hit us with the cane, he made a 
face as if he were taking a physic." 

Fielding, Henry (1707-1754) . Author of Tom Jones, History of Jona- 
than Wild, and other novels. 

Fiend in Spenser. Faerie Queene, II. 7. 64. The Fiend is the evil 
spirit whom Guyon, the Kjiight of Temperance, meets in the cave 
of Mammon. 

" Guyon finds Mamon in a delve 
Sunning his threasure hore : 
Is by him tempted and led downe 
To see his secrete store." 

Fifth of November. Guy Fawkes Day. On that day, 1605, Fawkes 
tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament, but failed. His failure 
caused such rejoicing that the date has ever since been commemo- 
rated. 

First Folio of Shakespeare. Published in 1623 and so named to dis- 
tinguish it from three other folio editions published in the same 
century. 

Fisc. A royal treasury. 

Five points. The five points of the Calvinistic theology were Original 
Sin, Predestination, Irresistible Grace, Particular Redemption, 
Final Perseverance. 

Flamen. A Roman priest. An archflamen was a high priest. 

Flappers. A monitor who reminds one of some duty or wakens one 
from a dreamy state. In Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Gulliver 
comes to Laputa, where the inhabitants are dreamers. They 
were so absent-minded that they had to be aroused by " flappers," 
who struck their masters with blown bladders. 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 275 

Flower Pot, The. An inn in Bishopsgate Street, next to the South-Sea 
House, whence coaches continued on their way to the north of 
London. 

Flushes. In card-playing, cards all of one color or one suit. 

Foppington, Lord. A shallow affected dandy in Sir John Vanbrugh's 
comedy. The Relapse, 1697. 

Fortinbras. A character in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Cf. Hamlet, IV. 
4. 55-56. 

Fox, George (1624-1691). The founder of the Society of Friends, or 
Quakers {q.v.). His life depicts a varied career: apprentice to a 
grazier, to a shoemaker; a preacher; a friend of Cromwell; and 
the organizer of a strong religious sect. 

Fr . Frederick William Franklin, master of the Hartford branch 

of Christ's Hospital from 1801 to 1827. 

Friar John. •' A tall, lean, wide-mouthed, long-nosed friar of Seville 
. . . who swore lustily and fought like a Trojan with the staff of a 
cross." — Brewer. When he had crushed his adversary he con- 
demned his soul "■ to all the devils in hell! " He is immortalized 
in the French writer Rabelais's Gargantua. 

Fuller ("old"), Thomas (1608-1661). A worthy divine and writer; 
author of many works, among which The Worthies of England 
is the masterpiece. This book covers England by counties, con- 
tains a host of miscellaneous facts and diverting fancies, and is 
written in a quaint but lively style. Under the title " Warwick- 
shire," Fuller describes the "wit-combats" between Shakespeare 
and Ben Jonson. 

G. D. See Dyer, George. 

Galilean land. France. 

Garrick, David (1716-1779) . Garrick was the foremost actor of his age, 
and one of the greatest of all English actors. With Johnson, 
whose friend and pupil he was, he came to London in 1737, for the 
purpose of studying law. Soon, however, he gave up his idea of 
becoming a barrister to follow his natural bent. His influence 
on the stage was ever good and purifying. For a generation he 
was the leader of the English stage, and he was, in a large meas- 
ure, responsible for the Shakespearean revival of his day. For his 
memorial at Lichfield, Johnson wrote these words: " I am disap- 
pointed by that stroke of death which has eclipsed the gayety of 
nations, and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure." 
John Lamb, the father of Charles, had some physical resemblances 
to Garrick. 

Gascoigne, Old Bamber (1725-1791). Member of Parliament from 
Bifrons, in Essex. 

Gatty, Henry (1774-1844). An English comedian who was noted for his 
old-man parts. 



276 EXPLANATORY INDEX 

Gebir. A poem by Walter Savage Landor. 

Gibbon, Edward (1737-1791). Author of the Decline and Fall of the 
Roman Empire. 

Gideon's Miracle. A fleece of wool exposed on the ground was wet 
with dew while all the earth around it was dry. Cf. Judges vi. 
37, 38. The converse of this miracle is told in verses 39, 40 : " For 
it was dry upon the fleece only, and there was dew on all the 
ground." Gf. also Cowley's lines in "The Complaint," stanza 7: 

"For ev'ry tree and ev'ry land around, 
With pearly dew was crowned, 
And upon all the quicken'd ground 
The fruitful seed of Heaven did brooding lie, 
And nothing but the Muse was dry." 

Glover, Eichard (1712-1785). A poet, man of affairs, a representative 
in Parliament, and of good repute in all matters. Besides Leoni- 
das, he wrote other poems and made eloquent speeches in Parlia- 
ment. 

Gog and Magog. Fabulous giants. In Revelation xx. 7-9, they per- 
sonate all enemies of Christianity. 

Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras. Monsters of Greek mythology. 
The Gorgons were three sisters, the most awful of whom was 
Medusa, whose hair was entwined with serpents. So hideous was 
she that whoever looked on her was turned to stone. The 
Hydras refer to the nine-headed monster of the Lernean marshes 
in Argolis, slain by Hercules. The Chimera was a monster with a 
goat's body, a lion's head, and a dragon's tail, slain by Bellerophon. 

Goshen. The district allotted to the children of Israel for their residence 
in Egypt. While Pharaoh and the Egyptians suffered from the 
plagues, the dwellers in Goshen were exempt. Hence the word 
means a refuge, a place of safety. Exodus vii. 22, ix. 2.3-26, xi. 8. 

Gothic tribes. An ancient nation living in the north of Europe, that 
took an important part in the overthrow of the Roman Empire. 
They are described as large, blue-eyed, great feeders, respecters of 
law and order, with a high regard for women and a veneration for 
life and death. 

Grecian. "The Deputy Grecians were in Homer, Cicero, and Demos- 
thenes ; the Grecians in the Greek plays and mathematics. Those 
who became Grecians always went to the University, though not 
always into the Church ; which was reckoned a departure from the 
contract." — Leigh Hunt, Autohiography . 

Greek Calends and Latter Lammas. The Greeks had no calends — 
the first day of each month among the Romans. Lammas is Au- 
gust 1. Hence the phrases signify never. 

Gresham, Thomas (1519?-1579). Founder of the Royal Exchange and 
Gresham College. He was a noted financier in Elizabeth's time. 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 277 

Greville, Fulke, Lord Brook (1554-1628). Author of some poems, trag- 
edies, and The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney, and of his 
own epitaph, which reads: "Fulke Greville, servant to Queen 
Elizabeth, councillor to King James, and friend to Sir Philip 
Sidney." 

Grey Friars. A school established on the site of the old Grey Friars' 
Monastery. The Grey Friars were the Franciscan friars, and were 
so called because of their gray habit. 

Grotiuses. Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), a Dutchman who was the founder 
of international law, wrote De Jure Belli et Pads — " The Law of 
AVar and Peace." 

Guildhall giants. The Guildhall was " the old council-hall of the city 
of London, founded 1411, and restored after the fire of 1666." The 
"giants," two colossal wooden images, called Gog and Magog, 
originally stood "guardant" at the door, but in 1708 they were 
removed and placed upon octagon stone columns under the west 
window of the Guildhall — "guardant of nothing." 

H . Hodges. 

Habakkuk. The Old Testament prophet who lamented the iniquities of 
Israel in the midst of its ruins. He prophesied probably about the 
years 620-610 B.C. 

Hades of Thieves. The penal colonies in Australia. Botany Bay, the 
most noted of these convict colonies, was settled in 1737. Blades, 
in classical mythology, was the place of torment. 

Hagar's offspring. Ishmael, the son of Hagar, who was the bond- 
woman of Abraham, was cast out of the household at the bidding 
of Sarah, Abraham's wife. 

Hall-feast. An immense banquet given by one of the guilds of London 
in their guild hall. The banquet was inaugurated by a clergyman 
who asked a grace. 

Hallowmas. All Hallows' or All Saints' Day, November 1. 

Hare Court. " The Lambs lived at 4 Inner Temple Lane from 1809 to 
1817. Writing to Coleridge in June, 1809, Lamb says : — 

" ' The rooms are delicious, and the best look backwards to Hare 
Court, where there is a pump always going. Hare Court trees 
come in at the window, so that it's like living in a garden.' " — Lucas. 

Harrington, James (1611-1677). A political writer who devised a 
scheme of perfect government modeled on More's Utopia, which 
he published in his Commonwealth of Oceana. 

Hathaway, Matthias. Steward at Christ's Hospital from 1790 to 1813. 
Leigh Hunt, in his Autobiography, III, 59, says: — 

" The name of the steward, a thin stiff man of invincible formal- 
ity of demeanor, admirably fitted to render encroachment impos- 
sible, was Hathaway. We of the grammar school used to call him 
'the Yeoman,' on account of Shakespeare's having married the 



278 EXPLANATORY INDEX 

daughter of a man of that name, designated as ' a substantial 
yeoman.' " 

Haydn, Joseph (1732-1809). An Austrian composer of music. 

Hays. An old Eiiglish country dance which was very popular until 
recent years. 

Helicon. The Muses' Mount. It is a part of the Parnassus, a mountain 
range in Boeotia in Greece. It had two sacred springs, Aganippe 
and Hippocrene. 

Heliogabalus. A Roman emperor (204-222) notorious for his licentious 
life and luxurious living. 

Helots. The slave class of Laconia. Spartan parents sometimes made 
the Helots drunk so that they might stand as terrible examples to 
the severely trained young Spartans. 

Helvellyn. A mountain on the borders of Cumberland and Westmore- 
land, in the Lake District. Helvellyn (3118 feet), the second high- 
est mountain in the district, has no peak and hardly any crags on 
one side, but it has a huge mass, and an effect of size is enhanced 
by the broken edges of the steep side on which you stand. Lamb 
visited Coleridge for three weeks at Keswick iu 3802. 

Henley. A town, thirty-six miles from London, famous for its boat- 
races. 

Herculaneum. This city, with Pompeii, was buried in ashes and lava 
by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius a.d. 79. Recent excavations 
on the sites of these Italian cities have revealed much concerning 
ancient manners of living. 

Heresiarcli (" grand "). Arch chief of heretics. 

Hero and Leander. Two Greek lovers whose fateful ending appeals to 
all story readers. They lived on opposite sides of the Hellespont, 
and Leander was wont to swim across to meet Hero. One night, 
while attempting to cross in a storm, he perished. Hero, in grief, 
cast herself into the sea. Byron, Marlowe, and Keats tell the 
story in English verse. 

Herodias's daughter. She demanded that the head of John the Bap- 
tist should be served to her on a platter. Mark vi. 

Hesperian fruit. The golden apples of the tree that had sprung up to 
grace the wedding of Jove and Juno. The tree was guarded by 
Hesperis, her three daughters, and a dragon. It was one of Her- 
cules' tasks to procure the apples. 

Hexam, Battle of, and Surrender of Calais. Two comedies by George 
Colman the younger (1762-1836). 

Heywood, Thomas. An English dramatist (dates unknown). 

Hobbima (1638-1709). A Dutch landscape painter. 

Hogarth, Williani (1697-1764). A celebrated English painter and en- 
graver. His greatest strength lies in his power of satirizing the 
follies and sins of his generation. His " Rake's Progress," *' Mar- 
riage a la Mode," "The Distressed Poet," " The Enraged Musician," 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 279 

and " Industry and Idleness " are pictures which portray in grim 
and often ghastly style the shortcomings of unrighteous and weak- 
minded persons. Lamb knew Hogarth's prints by heart, admired 
the artist and his insight, and called him '• one of the greatest 
ornaments of England." One of Lamb's best critical essays is 
entitled "On the Genius and Character of Hogarth," The scene 
of "Noon" is laid in a French Huguenot chapel in Hog Lane, 
where St. Mary's Church now stands in Charing Cross Road. 

Hog Lane. Now Middlesex Street, Whitechapel. It was a place 
marked by disreputable scenes and evil-minded inhabitants. 

Hog's Norton. Mr. Lucas furnishes the following complete note : — 
" An old proverb runs: ' I think thou wast born at Hoggs-Norton, 
where piggs play upon the organs.' Hog's Norton is on the borders 
of Oxfordshire and Warwickshire. One account of the origin of 
the legend is the organ-playing of a villager named Pigg. In 
Witt's Recreation, there is this epigram on pigs' devouring a bed 
of pennyroyal, commonly called organs : — 

' A good wife once, a bed of organs set, 
The pigs came in, and eat up every whit ; 
The goodman said, Wife, you your garden may 
Hog's Norton call, here pigs on organs play.' " 

Holy Micliael. September 29, a feast-day in honor of St. Michael the 
Archangel. In England this day, known as Michaelmas Day, is 
one of the four quarter-days of the year when all rents, interests, 
and general accounts are settled. The other English quarter-days 
are : Lady Day, March 25 ; Midsummer, June 24 ; and Christmas, 
December 25. 

Holy Paul. St. Paul's Cathedral, London. A statue of John Howard, 
the prison-reformer, stands in St. Paul's. 

Holy Thomas. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), one of the most 
learned and pious theologians in the Roman Catholic Church; a 
member of the Dominican order. His chief work is the Summary 
of Theology. 

Homer. A Greek poet, author of the Iliad, which tells the story of 
Troy, and of the Odyssey, which tells of the wanderings of Odys- 
seus after the fall of Troy. The greatest poet of antiquity, and 
one of the greatest poets of all time. 

Hooker, Richard (1553 ?-1600) . Called the "judicious" ; author of A 
Treatise on the Laios of Ecclesiastical Polity, probably the greatest 
theological work in the English language. He was a graduate of 
Oxford, where he was a servitor. 

Hospitallers. Christ's Hospital boys. 

House Beautiful. A house beyond the Wicket Gate in Bunyan's Pil- 
grim's Progress. The "Interpreter" was the lord of the house 
who showed Christian (the Pilgrim) the man in the iron cage. 



280 EXPLANATORY INDEX 

Howard, Sir Robert (1626-1698). The brother-in-law of John Dryden, 
and joint author with him of The Indian Queen. The lines quoted 
in " The Superannuated Man " are from Howard's The Vestal Vir- 
gin or The Roman Ladies, V. 1. 

Howe, William (1729-1814). A British general in the American Revo- 
lution. 

Hugh of Lincoln. A little Christian boy who was stolen by the Jews 
of Lincoln in 1255, and by them tortured to death. The story has 
often been told in English literature ; first by Matthew Paris, a 
Benedictine monk, and by some old ballad singer whose story is 
recorded in Percy's Reliques, and also by Chaucer in his "Prior- 
ess's Tale." 

Hume, David (1711-1776). Author of a History of England. 

Hymen. The god of marriage in Greek and Roman mythology. 

Imperial forgetter: Nebuchadnezzar. And Nebuchadnezzar had a 
dream and his spirit was terrified with it and his dream went out 
of his mind. Daniel ii. 

India House. The East India House is the London headquarters of the 
East India Company, a joint-stock trading company formed to 
carry on commerce with the East Indies. The original charter of 
the Company was granted in 1600. It became not only a great 
commercial, but also a great political and territorial power. For 
a long time, until 1858, it was practically the governing power in 
India. Lamb was in the employ of the East India Company from 
April, 1792, to March, 1825. 

Ino Leucothea. The daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia and the wife 
of Athamas, king of Thebes. Athamas, inspired with frenzy by 
Juno, pursued his wife, who, to escape him, jumped into the sea 
and was made a goddess by Neptune. She was worshiped under 
the name of Leucothea, "the white goddess." Lamb tells her 
story completely in his juvenile book. The Adventures of Ulysses. 

Iris. Goddess of the rainbow. 

Iscariot. Judas Iscariot. Cf. John :s.n.Q, " Because he was a thief , 
and had the bag." His *' defalcation " took a holiday from the 
calendar. 

Islington. A parish two miles north of St. Paul's. Lamb lived there 
in 182.3. 

Italian Opera. Grand opera ; the drama is sung, not spoken. 

J. W. James White (1775-1820), a school-fellow of Lamb's at Christ's 
Hospital. Lamb, long after White's death, said of him, " There 
never was his like ; we shall never see such days as those in which 
he flourished." Elsewhere Lamb calls him "My merry friend, 
Jim White." 

J — U. Joseph Jekyll ; became a Bencher in 1795, a Master in Chancery 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 281 

in 1815, and died in 1837, aged eighty-five. He was enjoyed for his 
wit and pleasantry, but he was feeble in argument and empty of 
ideas. 

Jackson, Richard. Became a Bencher in 1770, a member of Parliament 
and a minister of the crown in 1783, and died in 1787. His exten- 
sive learning and prodigious memory gained him the sobriquet of 
*' Omniscient " — which Dr. Johnson translated as the " all-know- 
ing." 

Jael. The woman who treacherously murdered Sisera, the Captain of 
Jabin's army. " Then Jael, Heber's wife, took a nail of the tent, 
and took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and 
smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground ; for 
he was fast asleep and weary. So he died." — Judges iv. 18-24. 

Jamblicus. One of the Neo~Platonic (a refined revival of the doctrines 
of Plato) philosophers of the fourth century; author of a life of 
Pythagoras and works on philosophy. 

Janus. The Roman god who was represented as having two faces, thus 
seeing the past and the future at the same time. Lamb, in speak- 
ing of " half-Januses," means a Janus of one face, i.e. a Janus 
" looking at the past only," 

Jenyns, Soame (1704-1787). A miscellaneous writer much in vogue 
in his day. He wrote, among other things, A Free Inquiry into 
the Nature and Origin of Evil and The Ai^t of Dancing. 

Jericho. The walls around the city of Jericho fell at the blast of the 
rams' horns blown by the priests. Joshua vi. 

Jerome (340-420 a.d.). A father of the Latin Church, a translator of 
the Hebrew Scriptures into Latin — the Vulgate version. 

Jewel, John (1522-1571). Bishop of Salisbury ; author of Apologia 
pro Ecclesia Anglicana, " An Apology for the Church of Eng- 
land," He has been characterized as " a learned, pious, and 
modest divine." 

Jocos Risus-que. The spirits of jest and laughter. 

John Murray's Street. Albemarle Street, Piccadilly, where John 
Murray (1778-1843) founded the great publishing firm of that 
name. Few publishers have had such long and intimate acquaint- 
ance with their authors as the Murrays. 

Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784), Dr. Johnson, the literary dictator of 
his time, was famous as a lexicographer, essayist, critic, and con- 
versationalist. On account of his great classical erudition, and his 
use of polysyllabic words and involved sentence structure, his 
works are little read, with the exception of his Oriental tale 
Basselas and the Lives of the Poets. His fame rests largely on 
his striking personality, his innate goodness, and his saving com- 
mon sense. No other man in English literature is so thoroughly 
known as Johnson, who has been presented to us in the greatest 
biography in any language — Boswell's Life of Johnson. 



282 EXPLANATORY INDEX 

Joseph's vest. The "coat of many colors." Cf. Ger^es^s xxxvii. 
Josephus, Flavius (d. about 100 a.d.). Author of Jewish Antiquities 

and Wars of the Jews. 
Jubal. " The father of all such as handle the harp and organ." — Genesis 

iv. 21. 
Jude (" the better ") . The Apostle, to distinguish him from Judas 

Iscariot, who betrayed Christ. 

K. (" Spiteful "). James Kenney (1780-1820), a dramatist ; author of 

Raising the Wind. He married a French woman and lived for 

many years at Versailles, where the Lambs visited him in 1822. 
Eemble, John Philip (1757-1823). The great actor of Shakespearean 

parts. He was a brother of Sarah Siddons and of Charles Kemble, 

who was the father of Fanny Kemble. 
Keinble, Mrs. Charles. She was Miss De Camp, an actress, before 

her marriage to Charles Kemble (1775-1854), the brother of Sarah 

Siddons and John Kemble, noted actors. 
Kempis, Thomas a (1380-1471). A German mystic who is reputed 

to have written De Imitatione Christi — "After the Manner of 

Christ." One of the translators of the book was George Stanhope, 

Dean of Canterbury. 
Keppel, Augustus (1725-1786) . An Admiral in the English navy. He 

made some stir in the world when he was accused of misconduct 

by a subordinate, but was acquitted after a trial. 
Eubla Ehan. In Coleridge's poem Euhla Khan is a description of a 

wonderful palace : — 

" It was a miracle of rare device, 
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice ! " 

" A damsel with a dulcimer 
In a vision once I saw: 
It was an Abyssinian maid. 
And on a dulcimer she played 
Singing of Mount Abora." 

This palace was built in Xanadu, 

" Where Alph, the sacred river, ran 
Through caverns measureless to man 
Down to a sunless sea." 

L ., John. John Lamb, the brother of Charles. 

L . Lacy, a name invented by Lamb. 

L's governor. Samuel Salt {q.v). 

Lady Day. March 25, the feast of the Annunciation, — the time when 
the Virgin Mary was told that she was to be the Mother of Christ. 

Lambeth Palace. The London residence of the Archbishop of Canter- 
bury, the Primate of the Church of England. 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 283 

Lane's novels. ''Better known as the novels of the Minerva Press, 
from which Lane, the publisher, issued innumerable works." 

— Ainger. 

Lar, Queen. The Lares and the Penates were the household gods of 
the Romans ; the souls of ancestors who protected the hearth. 
Therefore, Mrs. Montagu was the spirit of the home, the angel of 
the hearth. 

Lardner, Nathaniel (1684-1768) . Author of a noted text-book on the 
defense of the Christian religion. 

Latimer, Hugh (1485-1555). A famous prelate in the English Church. 
He wore the gown of a servitor at Cambridge. He was burned at 
Oxford. 

" Laughing Audience " (Hogarth's). This picture is exceedingly well 
described by Professor Dowden in his Shakspere, His Mind and 
Art, Chapter VII. See Hogarth. 

Lavinian shores. Lavinium in Italy. After the sack of Troy ^neas 
fled to the Lavinian shores. JEneid, I. 2. 

Lazarus. The beggar, "full of sores," who desired to be fed with the 
crumbs which fell from the table of Dives, the rich man. Luke 
xvi. 19-31. 

Lear. King Lear, in Shakespeare's tragedy of that name. In Act III 
is a description of the King's madness, brought on by the ill-treat- 
ment of his disloyal daughters, Goneril and Regan. He spends 
the night in a storm with a fool and the faithful Kent. In Act II. 
4. 253, Lear says to his daughter Regan, "I gave you all." 

Lent. A period of fast, lasting forty days, from Ash- Wednesday to 
Easter. 

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519.) A famous Florentine painter. The 
print to which Lamb refers in " Imperfect Sympathies " was a re- 
production of the Vierge aux Rochers, " The Virgin of the Rock." 

Lethe. The river of oblivion in Hades. Whoever drank of this stream 
at once forgot his past existence. Lamb in "Dream-Children" 
suggests the idea of incarnation, that is, that after the lapse of 
ages these children of his imagination may become children in 
the flesh, a reality and not phantoms of a dream. Of. Vergil's 
JSneid, VI. 748-751. 

Levities. " The spirits of humor and laughter." — Lucas. 

Lictor. Among the ancient Romans, the lictor was an attendant of the 
consuls ; he carried an ax amid a bundle of rods as an ensign of 
his office. 

Lincoln. Lincolnshire. Lamb's father came from Lincolnshire. 

Lions in the Tower. The Royal Menagerie was formerly kept near the 
western gate of the Tower of London ; later, in 1831, it was re- 
moved to the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park. 

Listen, John (1776-1846) . An English comedian, popular in many parts 
in various London theaters. 



284 EXPLANATORY INDEX 

Locke, John (1632-1704). An English philosopher and writer on 
educational topics. Like Rousseau, Locke was a believer in 
the modern theory of education that the natural disposition of 
the child should determine what kind of education should be 
given to him. 

London Magazine. This magazine, founded in 1820, had for its first 
editor, John Scott (1783-1821). Lamb, who was probably intro- 
duced to the Londo7i by Hazlitt, made his first contribution to the 
magazine in August, 1820. Scott, a very able man and editor, had 
a quarrel with John Gibson Lockhart, the son-in-law of Sir Walter 
Scott, which finally ended in a duel with J. H. Christie, Lockhart's 
friend. Scott was wounded, and died in February, 1821. After 
his death the London led a varied career, going from bad to worse 
until 1825 when it fell on evil days. Lamb was an almost con- 
tinual contributor from 1820 to 1823, but from January to August, 
1825, he wrote but little for the London. He next identified him- 
self with the New Monthly Magazine. The London in its day had 
many famous contributors, among whom were Lamb, Hazlitt, 
De Quincey, Allan Cunningham, Thomas Hood, Keats, Thomas 
Carlyle, and Landor. 

Lothbury. " The street which runs on the north side of the Bank of 
England ; the region where business men and clerks most congre- 
gate." — Hallward and Hill. Read Wordsworth's " Reverie of 
Poor Susan." 

Louis the Fourteenth (King of France, 1643-1715). Henry IV of 
France, in the Edict of Nantes, promised the French Protestants 
tolerance and security. In 1685 Louis XIV, by his revocation of 
the Edict, drove thousands of the Huguenots, or French Prot- 
estants, from France and prostrated the country. Many of these 
French refugees took up their residence in London, 

Lovel. John Lamb, the father of Charles. 

"Lover, The Eoyal, and Lady G " and "The Melting Platonic 

and the old Beau." Waucope explains these references to "two 
cartoons on the dissolute Prince Regent, afterwards George IV 
(1702-1830)." 

Lucca Giordano (1631-1705). An inferior Neapolitan artist. 

Lucian (c. 120-200). A Greek satirist whose treatment of even 
religious subjects was marked by keen wit. Sir Richard Jebb 
remarks that "Lucian has much in common with Swift, and more, 
perhaps, with Voltaire." 

Lucretian pleasure. A reference to Lucretius's Be ReruniNatura, II, 
1-4. " Sweet it is, when the winds are troubling the waters on 
the wide sea, to contemplate from the shore the hardship of an- 
other, not because it is a delicious satisfaction to feel that any one 
should be miserable, but because it is consoling to discern from 
what evils we ourselves are free." 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 285 

Lully, Raymond (1235-1315). A mediaeval philosopher and alchemist, 

author of Ars Magna a.nd a system of logic. 
Lutheran beer. Luther is said to have been fond of his beer. 

M ("my friend"). Thomas Manning (1772-1840) and Charles Lamb 
first met in 1799, and from that time they became intimate friends 
and capital correspondents. Manning was a traveler, a linguist, 
and a mathematician.- Lamb, writing to Coleridge in 1826, says : 
** I am glad you esteem Manning, though you see but his husk or 
shrine. He discloses not, save to select worshipers, and will 
leave the world without any one hardly but me knowing how stu- 
pendous a creature he is." Elsewhere, writing to Lloyd, he says 
of Manning, " A man of great power, — an enchanter almost, — 
only he is lazy and does not put forth all his strength." Few of 
Lamb's letters are more interesting than his letters to Manning. 

M's ("at our friend"). Basil Montagu, Q.C. (1770-1851), a legal 
writer ; a friend of Lamb, Wordsworth, and Coleridge ; and editor 
of Bacon's works. Mrs. Montagu, Montagu's third wife, was a 
Mrs. Skepper. Carlyle corresponded with her, and Edward Irving 
called her "the noble lady." Her daughter, Anne Skepper, the 
" A. S." of " Oxford in the Vacation," became the wife of Bryan 
Waller Procter, the poet and man of letters, who wrote under the 
pseudonym of Barry Cornwall. Procter, who vouches for the 
George Dyer incident, was the schoolmate of Lord Byron and Sir 
Robert Peel at Harrow, the friend and companion of Keats, Lamb, 
Shelley, Coleridge, Landor, Hunt, Talfourd, and Rogers, — the man 
to whom Thackeray dedicated his Vanity Fair. 

Maccaronies. This word, meaning fops or dandies, came into use in 
England some time between 1750 and 1775. Horace Walpole tells 
us about the Maccaroni Club, which was composed of "all the 
traveled young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses." 

Machiavel, Niccolo (1469-1527). A Florentine statesman and author 
who was engaged in many diplomatic missions, and who was 
imprisoned for conspiring against the Medici, the rulers of 
Florence. His greatest work. The Prince, in which he discusses 
political ideals and manipulations, has been both commended and 
condemned for its policies. Certainly he was crafty and cunning. 
Lamb alludes to his Florentine History. 

Macready, William Charles (1793-1873). An English actor who 
attained eminent distinction in the parts of Macbeth, Lear, 
Cassius, lago, Richelieu, and Virginius. Macready met Lamb at 
Talfourd's, where Lamb said that he wished to draw his last breath 
through a pipe and exhale it in a pun. This meeting was in 1834, 
nine years after the time of the " Barbara S " essay. 

Magdalen (pronounced Maudlin). St. Mary Magdalen College of 
Oxford, founded by Bishop Waynflete in 1457. 



286 EXPLANATORY INDEX 

Malone, Edmund (1741-1812). An Irish critic and editor of Shake- 
speare's plays and poems. The incident Lamb pictures in ** De- 
tached Thoughts on Books and Reading" "happened in 1793 on 
the occasion of Malone's visit to Stratford to examine the mu- 
nicipal and other records of that town, for the purpose of his 
edition of Shakespeare." — Ainger. 

Mammon. The story of Mammon, the Money God, is told by Spenser 
in the Faerie Queene, Book II, canto vii, The Legend of Sir Guyon, 
the Knight of Temperance. Mammon was the Chaldaic god of' 
riches. Milton describes him in Paradise Lost, I. 678. 

Man, Henry (1747-1799). The author of the now " forgotten volumes " 
entitled Miscellaneous ^'07-^:5 in Verse and Prose of the late 
Henry Man, London, 1802. Among the subscribers to Man's 
volumes, the reader of Lamb's essay on the " South-Sea House " 
will readily recognize the names of John Evans, Richard Plumer, 
Thomas Tipp, and Thomas Maynard. Mr. Lucas asserts that 
Man became deputy-secretary of the South-Sea House in 1776; 
other editors, notably the Rev. Alfred Ainger, give the date as 
1793. Many of Man's contributions were to the newspapers, 
chiefly to the Morning Chronicle, the London Gazette, and the 
Public Ledger. 

Mandeville, Bernard (1670-1733). Author of a poem entitled The 
Grumbling Hive, which was reprinted in 1714 with the title The 
Fable of the Bees; or Private Vices, Public Benefits. The book 
was a favorite of Lamb's. 

"March to Finchley." A "picture drama " by Hogarth {q.v.). The 
picture shows soldiers marching to Finchley in a merry mood, 
with a merry crowd of followers. The pie-man with his wares on 
his head is marching beside the chimney-sweep with his brush. 

Marcion. A sectarian, heretic of the first century, who rejected the 
Old Testament and adhered to St, Paul as the true teacher. 

Margate. On the Isle of Thanet in Kent. A hoy was a sloop-rigged 
vessel, with one deck and a single mast, used in coast trading and 
passenger traffic. 

Marlowe, Kit. Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), Shakespeare's great- 
est predecessor, was the author of Dr. Faustus, Tamhurlaine, The 
Jew of Malta, and Edivard II. 

Marsyas. The Phrygian flute player who challenged Apollo, the god 
of music, to a contest of skill. Being defeated by Apollo, he was 
flayed alive for his presumption. This story is the subject of a 
painting by the Spanish artist, Spagnoletti, "The Little Span- 
iard," whose real name was Jusepe Ribera. The picture, which was 
painted in the seventeenth century, now hangs in the Museum at 
Madrid. 

Marvell, Andrew (1621-1678) . An English poet who is remembered for 
two things: his association with Milton as assistant Latin-secre- 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 287 

tary under Cromwell, and his charming nature poetry, written 
with romantic intensity and with matter-of-fact realism. The 
most beautiful of his poems are " The Garden " and " The Mower 
to the Glow-worms." He was one of Lamb's favorite poets. 

Maseres, Baron. Francis Maseres (1731-1824) was for fifty years Cur- 
sitor Baron of the Exchequer ("whose business is to make out 
writs, summoning a defendant to appear, before a suit begins"). 
Throughout his life he wore the costume of the reign in which he 
was born. 

Mathews, Charles. He made a famous collection of theatrical por- 
traits, now in the Garrick Club collection. 

May Day. First of May. 

Meshech. " Woe is me that I sojourn in Mesech." — Psalm cxx. 5. 

Michael, Holy. September 29 is his feast day ; a quarter-day in Eng- 
land. 

Michael Angelo's Moses. Michael Angelo Buonarroti (1475-1564), the 
famous Italian painter, sculptor, architect, and poet, made the 
colossal statue of Moses in the church of San Pietro in Vinculio at 
Rome. The hair on the head is arranged in such a peculiar way 
that it gives the effect of horns. " The horns arise from the Vul- 
gate mistranslation, quod cormita esset fades ejus (that his face 
was horned), of Exodus xxxiv. 29, where the English version has 
' Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone.' The Hebrew 
word queren, a horn, is from the root quaran, to shine." 

— Hallward and Hill. 

Midas. The ears of King Midas of Phrygia were changed into asses' 
ears for deciding, in a musical contest between Pan and Apollo, 
the god of music, that Pan was the better musician. 

Middleton, Thomas Fanshaw (1769-1822) . Consecrated bishop of Cal- 
cutta in 1814. He conducted the County Spectator, a magazine, in 
1792-1793. 

Milton, John (1608-1674). Author of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, 
L' Allegro, II Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas, and other poems. He is 
ranked next to Shakespeare as the greatest English poet. Lamb 
had a great admiration for Milton and for Milton's poems. 

Mincing Lane. The South-Sea House was in Mincing Lane, which runs 
between Fenwick Street and Great Tower Street. The old East 
India House, where Lamb spent thirty-three of his thirty-six years 
of desk drudgery, stood at the corner of Leadenhall-Lime Street, 
not far away. 

Minerva ("born in panoply"). The goddess of wisdom who sprang 
fully armed from the head of Jupiter. 

Mingay, James. He became a Bencher in 1785; died in 1812. He was 
noted as a lawyer, an orator, and a wit. He was also an eminent 
King's Counsel, hence his iron hand. 

Mirandula. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) ; a young Ital- 



288 EXPLANATORY INDEX 

ian nobleman of brilliant intellect, refined manners, and extraor- 
dinary attainments; the associate of Lorenzo de Medici and of 
Politian, famous scholars and men of affairs. 

" Miserere." The Fifty-first Psalm. 

Montagu, Edward Wortley (1713-1776). Son of Lady Mary Wortley 
Montagu ; a famous traveler who began his wanderings by running 
away from Westminster School and becoming, among other things, 
a chimney-sweep. 

Mordecai. Haman, who was invited to Queen Esther's banquet, was 
disquieted because he saw Mordecai the Jew sitting at the gate. 
Esther iv. and v. 

Mowbray. The name of an ancient English family that traces its an- 
cestry to the thirteenth century. 

Mozart, Wolfgang (1756-1791). An Austrian music composer. 

Mulberry-Gardens. Mulberry Garden occupied the present site of 
Buckingham Palace and Garden. The mulberry trees were 
planted by James I (1603-1625), who wished to introduce silk 
culture into England. In the seventeenth century it was a noted 
pleasure resort. 

Mumchance. A game of cards or dice, played in silence ; hence the 
adjective use of the word in the sense of glum and silent. 

Munden, Joseph Shepherd (1758-1832) . An actor who interested Lamb. 
Lamb wrote an essay entitled " On the Acting of Munden," besides 
other papers on Munden. 

Muses' Hill. Either Parnassus or Helicon, where the fountains Aga- 
nippe and Hippocrene rose. Lamb in " Oxford in the Vacation" 
refers to the Universities as the Muses' hill. 

Nando's. A Fleet Street coffee-house. 

Naylor, James (1617-1660). A fanatic Quaker who, imagining himself 
to be the reincarnation of Christ, entered Bristol in 1655, naked, 
on horseback, in imitation of Christ's entry into Jerusalem. Par- 
liament severely punished him for his audacity and blasphemous 
behavior. Lamb calls him "my favorite" — a term which may 
probably be explained in the essay " A Quakers' Meeting." 

Neptune. The god of the sea. The tritons were sea-gods, and the 
nereids were sea-nymphs. 

Nero. The sixth and last of the Julian line of Roman emperors. His 
reign (a.d. 54-68) was marked by crimes of almost incredible enor- 
mity, tyranny, and disgrace. Neronian persecution has become a 
synonym for any kind of inhuman treatment. 

Nessian venom. When Nessus, the centaur, tried to carry off Deja- 
nira, the wife of Hercules, the giant slew him. AVith his dying 
breath Nessus led Dejanira to believe that if she dipped the robe of 
Hercules in the flowing blood of the centaur, she could ever hold 
the love of her husband. Later when Hercules donned the cloak 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 289 

the blood penetrated his limbs, and he tore away whole pieces of his 
body in wrenching the garment from him, and died in consequence. 

Nevis, An island in the British West Indies. 

Newcastle, Margaret. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle 
(1624-1673), wrote the life of her husband, "The Life of the Thrice 
Noble, High, and Puissant Prince William Cavendish, and Earl of 
Newcastle ; by the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Prin- 
cess, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, his Wife." Horace Walpole 
describes her as a "fertile pendant, with an unbounded passion 
for scribbling." 

Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1727). English philosopher, scientist, mathe- 
matician, and discoverer of the law of gravitation. 

Norris, EandaU. " For many years Sub-Treasurer and Librarian of the 
Inner Temple. At the age of fourteen he was articled to Mr. Walls 
of Paper Buildings, and from that time, for more than half a cen- 
tury, resided in the Inner Temple. . . . His name appears early 
in Charles's correspondence. At the season of his mother's death 
he [Lamb] tells Coleridge that Mr. Norris had been more than a 
father to him, and Mrs. Norris more than a mother. Mr. Norris 
died in the Temple in January, 1827, at the age of seventy-six. . . . 
It was then that Charles Lamb wrote to Crabb Robinson, ' In him 
I have a loss the world cannot make up. He was my friend and 
my father's friend all the life I can remember. I seem to have 
made foolish friendships ever since. Those are the friendships 
which outlive a second generation. Old as I am waxing, in his 
eyes I was still the child he first knew me. To the last he called 
me Charley. I have none to call me Charley now.' " — Ainger. 

Nov. Vincent Novello (1781-1861). A friend of all the Lamb group, 
and the father of Mary Victoria, better known to fame as Mrs. 
Cowden Clarke, who besides her Concordance to Shakespeare 
wrote interestingly about Lamb. Novello was himself a composer 
and musician of no mean power, as Lamb's essay " A Chapter on 
Ears " testifies. 

O'Keefe, John (1747-1833). Author of many farces and comic operas. 
The quotation from O'Keefe at the head of " The Superannuated 
Man" is said, by Mr. Lucas, to be Colman's. Among O'Keefe's 
most popular plays were Tony Lumpkin, Wild Oats, and The 
Agreeable Surprise. 

Ombre. A Spanish game of cards, so called from the Spanish phrase 
used by the player who declares trumps: Yo soy I'hombre, "I am 
the man." The usual number of players is three. It is a game 
requiring much ingenuity and skill. Pope, in canto iii of The 
Rape of the Lock, describes it very accurately. It is seldom played 
now. ** Spadille " is the ace of spades, which is the second best 
card in the game. 



290 EXPLANATORY INDEX 

Oratorio. A long musical composition connected with some subject 
from Scripture. 

Oriel. A college at Oxford, founded by Adam de Brome and Edward 
II, in 1326. Oriel College had many rare books in its keeping. 

Origan (d. 254). A father of the early Greek Church, whose piety led 
him to advocate extreme views on sanctity. 

Orphean lyre. The lyre of Orpheus, the famous poet and musician of 
antiquity. Lamb's reference in " The South-Sea House" is taken 
from Milton's Paradise Lost, in, 17. He means "my friend's 
music was very far from charming." 

Osric. An affected character in Hamlet. 

Ovid (43 B.C.-18 A.D.). In his Metamorphoses, Book iii, this Roman 
poet tells the story of how the hunter Actseon, who saw the god- 
dess Diana bathing, was changed by the angry goddess to a stag 
with sprouting horns, and was hunted to death by his own dogs. 
In the same work. Book vi, Ovid tells how Marsyas, a mortal, 
finding the flute of the goddess Athene, challenged Apollo, the god 
of music. Although Apollo was judged victor in their contest, he 
flayed Marsyas alive. Ovid's Heroides tells " the stories of hero- 
ines who have perished for love." 

Oxenford. An old name for Oxford; the original meaning being, 
doubtless, the ford of the oxen. 

P. {" Our Mutual Friend "). Has not been identified. 

P , Susan. Susannah Pierson, sister of Peter Pierson (or Peirson), 

to whom Samuel Salt left a legacy of books, money, and a silver 
inkstand, " hoping that reading and reflection would make her 
more comfortable." 

Paley, William (1743-1805). Author of Moral Philosophy and Chris- 
tian Evidences. 

Pam. The knave of clubs, which is always the highest card in Lu, a 
popular game of cards in the eighteenth and early nineteenth cen- 
turies. Cf. Pope's Rape of the Lock, III, 61-62 : — 

" Mighty Pam, that kings and queens o'erthrew, 
And mow'd down armies in the fights of Lu." 

Pamela. A novel of manners, in epistolary form, by Samuel Richard- 
son (1689-1761). His greatest novel is Clarissa Harlowe, also writ- 
ten in the form of letters. 

Pan. The Greek god of the woods and the fields, who in later mythol- 
ogy became a symbol of all Nature. Sylvanus presided over for- 
est glades and plowed fields. 

Paracelsus. The assumed name of a celebrated German physician, 
Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenhum (1493-1541), who substituted 
for the abstract speculations of the Schoolmen of the Middle Ages 
the study of living nature. 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 291 

** Paradise Lost." The great poem by John Milton, published in 1667. 

Parker, Archbishop (1504-1575). Archbishop of Canterbury; he was, 
like Bishop Bull, a petty tyrant in ecclesiastical matters. 

Parnassus. A mountain of Phocis in Greece, where dwelt Apollo, the 
^od of music, and the nine Muses. 

Patmos (" disappointing book in "). " And I took the little book out 
of the angel's hand, and ate it up, and it was in my mouth sweet as 
honey ; and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter." — Rev- 
elation X. 10. 

Penn, William (1644-1718). The founder of Pennsylvania (Penn's 
Woods) and Philadelphia (The City of Brotherly Love) ; an illus- 
trious member of the Society of Friends or Quakers. Although a 
peaceable man, he would not endure unrighteous persecution. In 
his celebrated trial at the Old Bailey in 1670, he vindicated the 
right of a jury to render a verdict contrary to the dictation of a 
judge. Judge Jeffrey said : " It should be sufficient for the glory 
of William Penn that he stands upon record as the most humane, 
the most moderate, and the most pacific of all rulers." 

Pennant, Thomas (1726-1798). A Welsh antiquary, who published in 
1790 Some Account of London. He holds a more enduring fame as 
a favorite correspondent to whom Gilbert White wrote many let- 
ters now embraced in that quaint writer's Natural History of 
Selborne. 

Perry, John. Steward at Christ's Hospital from 1761-1785. 

Peter ("in his uneasy posture"). Peter, the Apostle, according to 
tradition, w^as crucified, head downward. St. Peter's Day is June 29. 

Phsedrus. A Macedonian slave who became a prominent Roman 
writer of fables in the first century a.d. 

Phoebus' sickly sister. The moon ; the pallid sister of the refulgent 
sun-god, Phoebus Apollo. 

Phoenix. A fabulous Egyptian bird which lives for five hundred years. 
When about to die, it builds in Arabia a nest of spices, burns itself 
to ashes, and comes forth with renewed life to live another five 
hundred years. 

Pierson (or Peirson), Peter. A Bencher in 1800, died in 1808. A friend 
of Samuel Salt. 

Pilate. " When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but rather 
that a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands 
before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this 
just person : see ye to it." — Mattheio xxvii. 24. 

Pimpernel, Henry, and John Naps. Imaginary personages named in 
the Introduction of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. Charac- 
ters " which never were nor no man ever saw." 

Pindar. A Greek poet of the fifth century b.c. His Odes, the only 
complete examples of his work remaining to us, are marked by 
high imagination and great spirit. 



292 EXPLANATORY INDEX 

Pique — repique — capot. French terms used in the game of cards 
called Piquet, a game similar to cribbage. A pique is the making 
of thirty points in hand and play before the adversary counts one. 
Repique is when one of the players counts thirty points in hand 
before the adversary has or can count one. Capot is when either 
person takes every trick. 

Piscator — Trout Hall. At Trout Hall, Piscator, a character in "Wal- 
ton and Cotton's The Complete Angler, meets Viator, another 
character in the book. 

PI . W. D. Plumley, a clerk in the India House. 

Plata — Orellana. The Plata River and the Amazon River in South 
America. 

Plato. The Greek philosopher. His philosophy is sublime in the sense 
that it deals with the higher order of thought ; the contemplation 
of the immortal mind, for instance, and the subsequent career of 
souls after death. Read Milton's II Penseroso, 88 ff. 

Plato's man. Messrs. Hallward and Hill make the following illu- 
minating explanation of this obscure reference. " In Milton's Latin 
poem, On the Platonic Idea, as it was understood by Aristotle, 
the archetype of human kind — the original man — existed first 
in the mind of God. 

*' ' Inform us who is He, 
That great original by nature chosen 
To be the archetype of human kind 
Unchangeable, immortal, with the poles 
Themselves coeval, one, yet everywhere, 
An image of the God who gave him being. 

ff: ^ ^ ff: 7^ ^ ^ 

He dwells not in his father's mind, but, though 

Of common nature with ourselves, exists 

Apart, and occupies a local home. 

Whether, companion of the stars, he spend 

Eternal ages, roaming at his will 

From sphere to sphere the tenfold heavens ; or dwell 

On the moon's side that nearest neighbors earth.' 

— (Cowper's translation. Globe Edition, p. 450.) 

Thus Plato's man is identified with the man in the moon. The 
configuration of the earth may make Australia a little nearer to 
the moon, and therefore to Plato's man, than England is." 

Plotinus. A Greek philosopher who founded the Neo-Platonic school 
of philosophy — a system of refined Platonic doctrines combined 
with Oriental mysticism. He lived in the third century. 

Plumer, Bichard. He became deputy-secretary in the South-Sea 
House in 1800, after the death of Henry Man. 

Pope, Alexander (1688-1744) . The greatest poet of the classical school 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 293 

of English poetry. He Was a strict classicist, believing in the 
dictates of correctness, common sense, conservatism, proportion, 
principles derived from past work and experience, and deprecated 
midue enthusiasm, sentimentality, impulse, and passion. His chief 
works are: The Essay on Man, The Essay on Criticism, The 
Dunciad, many odes, satires, epistles. The Rape of the Lock, 
his greatest work, is the greatest mock-heroic poem in the English 
language. Its subject is trivial, but its art is masterful. 

Population Essay. Thomas Malthus (17G6-1834) wrote The Principle 
of Population, 1798, which evoked much discussion and called 
fortli many other essays on the theory of population. 

Porson, Eichard (1759-1808). A famous classical scholar, Professor of 
Greek at Cambridge, and editor of many of the classics. 

Potters, Paul. Paul Potter (1625-1654:) was a Dutch painter, most 
renowned for his animal paintings. 

Pratt, Charles (1713-1794). As Chief Justice he ordered the liberation 
of John Wilkes on the plea that general warrants were illegal. He 
was afterward made Lord Chancellor and created Earl of Camden. 

Priam's refuse sons. Priam, King of Troy, had fifty sons, nine of 
them living, among whom Hector was the best beloved. When 
Hector was slain, Priam came to Achilles by night to beg the body 
of his favorite son from his slayer. All his other sons, though 
they "were the best men in wide Troy-land," were as nothing 
when compared with Hector. Read Homer's Iliad, XXIV. 186. 

Primrose Hill. North of Regent's Park, London, commanding a fine 
view of the city. 

Prince of the powers of darkness. Satan. EphesiansW. 2; vi. 12. 

Prior, Matthew (1664:-1721) . An English poet whose verse is marked 
by gayety and audacity, lightness and carelessness, and unaffected 
grace. His epigrams are among the best in English literature. 

Proponetic. The Proponetic Sea — the present Sea of Marmora, which 
is not subject to tides. Cf. Shakespeare's Othello, III. 3. 453: — 

*' Like to the Pontic Sea, 
Whose icy current and compulsive course 
Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on 
To the Propontic and the Hellespont." 

Proselytes of the gate. A stranger converted to Judaism , who was 
not held to a strict observance of the laws of Judaism. 

Prospero. The magician in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Read Act I. 
2. 144-148. 

Proteus. An ocean deity, son of Neptune, who tended the monsters of 
the sea. He possessed the prophetic gift and the power of chang- 
ing his shape at will. 

Psalmist, The. King David of Israel. 

Pyramus and Thisbe. Two Babylonian lovers whose story is common 



294 EXPLANATORY INDEX 

property in literature. Read the story in Gayley's Classic Myths, 
p. 78. 

Quadrille. Mr. Lucas has an illuminating note on this game of cards. 

" Quadrille is ombre played by four. It is primarily all against 
all, but he who thinks he can make the best game may improve 
his chances by demanding a partner, which is done by ' calling a 
king,' namely the king of the suit he leads; the player who plays 
the king in it becomes thereby his partner for the hand, his 
' friend.' Hence partners change with every hand. But if one's 
hand is very good, one can play sans prendre or sans appeler, i.e. 
without calling or taking a king and partner. The highest achieve- 
ment in any case is to make a vole, i.e. a grand slam, i.e. to take 
all the tricks. A sans prendre vole is, therefore, a grand slam 
without a partner, when single-handed you take every card in the 
pack." 

Quakers. A religious sect ; first so called, according to the Journal of 
George Fox, the founder, by " Justice Bennet, of Derby, because 
he bade him quake and tremble at the word of the Lord." They 
called themselves Friends. 

Quarter Days. In England they are: Lady Day, March 25; Midsum- 
mer, June 24; Michaelmas, September 29; and Christmas, Decem- 
ber 25. The time for settlement of rent, interest, etc. 

B ("the great Jew"). Nathan Meyer Rothschild (1777-1836), the 

founder of the English branch of the great European banking 
firm of that name. 

R. N. See Norris, Randall. 

Eabelais, Francois (1495?-1553). A French wit and satirist. His 
chief book, Gargantua, is a satire on the corruption in the church. 
As a writer, Rabelais was witty and satirical, but with a marked 
tendency toward coarseness. 

Bachels. Refers to " Rachel weeping for her children, . . . because 
they were not." — Jeremiah xxxi. 15. 

Eambler. A semi-weekly paper edited by Dr. Samuel Johnson from 
1750 to 1752. Dr. Johnson, through the effect of early privations 
and sufferings, was a ravenous gourmand. Macaulay, in his Life 
of Johnson, says, " The sight of food affected him as it affects wild 
beasts and birds of prey." You must not, however, judge of 
Johnson from this unpleasant trait. If possible, read Macaulay's 
TAfe of Johnsoti. 

Baphael. Raphael Sanzio (1483-1520), the most noted of Italian paint- 
ers. His paintings, such as " The Sistiue Madonna," " The Trans- 
figuration," "Marriage of the Virgin," "St. George and the 
Dragon," "Apollo and Marsyas," — to name only a few, — are 
among the greatest paintings in the world. 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 295 

Read, John. Became a Bencher in 1792 ; died, 1804. 

Read, M. Thomas Read kept the Saloop Coffee-House at 102 Fleet 
Street, where he dispensed "Saloop," an aromatic drink com- 
pounded of sassafras bark, milk, and sugar. 

Reculvers. ' ' The western towers of the old parish church of Reculver, 
on the Kentish shore of the mouth of the Thames, bear this name 
among navigators." — Lucas. 

Eed-letter days. Holidays or vacation days granted by the directors 
of the India House. After 1820, there were only five such holidays 
in the Accountants' Office, where Lamb worked. They are red- 
letter days because in the church calendar the important feast- 
days are indicated by red-lettering. 

Religio Medici. See Browne, Sir Thomas. 

Richard . . . Duke of York. In Shakespeare's Richard III, 11. 4 
and III. 2. 

Richards, George (1767-1837) . Mr. Lucas makes this note on Richards ; 
"His poem on 'Aboriginal Britons,' which won a prize given in 
1791 by Earl Harcourt, is mentioned favorably in Byron's English 
Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Richards became vicar of St. 
Martin's-in-the-Fields and a governor of Christ's Hospital. He 
founded a gold medal for Latin hexameters." 

Richmond, Duke of (1735-1806). Charles Lennox. A defender of the 
American colonies in the debate in Parliament. He was closely 
allied with the party of Lord Rockingham. 

Robertson, William (1721-1793). Author of a History of Scotland 
and other historical works. 

Rochester. John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), was 
a rake, an intriguer, a boon companion of the Merry Monarch, 
Charles II, and a poet. 

Rockingham, Marquis of (1730-1782). Charles Wentworth, Prime 
Minister of England, 1765-1766. He is chiefly noted because he 
made Edmund Burke his private secretary, brought Burke into 
the House of Commons, and spoke his sentiments through the 
voice of Burke. Burke calls him " a very noble person." 

Rogation Day. The Rogation Days are the Monday, Tuesday, and 
Wednesday before Ascension Day. 

Rosalind in Arden. The heroine in As Yoii Like It, who is banished 
from the court and goes to the Forest of Arden. 

Rosamond's Pond. Situated in the southwest corner of St. James's 
Park. It was filled up in 1770, probably on account of the many 
suicides of unhappy lovers who associated their disastrous loves 
with the story of Jane Clifford, the " Fair Rosamond." According 
to tradition, she was compelled by Queen Eleanor to poison 
herself (1176) because she had won the love of Henry IL 

Rosinante. Don Quixote's raw-boned charger. 

Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1712-1778). A French philosopher and 



296 EXPLANATORY INDEX 

writer on educational theories. His theory of education was 
based on the combination of the practical with the theoretical, 
and on tbe natural disposition of the child. 

Rowe, Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe (1674-1737). Author of Friendship in 
Death in Twenty Letters from the Dead to the Living. Her 
** superscriptions " of these letters were such as Lamb quotes 
and such as "From Oleander to his Brother, endeavoring to 
reclaim him from his extravagances," — which indicates the theme 
of the letters. 

Eowe, Nicholas (1674-1718), and Jacob Tonson (1656 ?-1736). The 
editor and the publisher of the first critical edition of Shakespeare, 
1709. 

S , Mrs. Mrs. Spinkes. 

St. Bartholomew. The fair of St. Bartholomew was held at Smithfield, 
a popular market place, from 1133 to 1855. The occasion was 
marked by riotous boisterousness. 

St. Christopher. St. Christopher, whose festival is celebrated on July 
25, was invoked as a defense against pestilence, and as "a stout 
sturdy patrole " he was called upon to frighten away the spirits 
who guard hidden treasure. In art he is represented as carrying 
the Christ child (hence his name, meaning the Christ-bearer) on his 
shoulders and leaning heavily on his staff to support the great 
weight. 

St. George. The patron saint of England. St, George in the person 
of the Red-Cross Knight, the knight who battles for Holiness, 
overcomes the monster dragon, Error, in Spenser's Faerie Queene, 
Book I. 1. 

Saint Gothard. Bishop of Hildesheim, ' * the patron saint of those at 
sea." 

St. Kitts. Abbreviation for St. Christopher's; an island near the 
island of Nevis in the British West Indies. 

St. Omar's. A Jesuit college at St. Omer, France, where British 
youth formerly attended. Lamb, of course, never went to school 
there. 

Salt, Samuel. " Samuel Salt was the son of the Rev. John Salt, 
of Audley, in Staffordshire ; and he married a daughter of Lord 
Coventry, thus being connected with Thomas Coventry by mar- 
riage. He was M.P. for Liskeard for some years, and a governor 
of the South-Sea House. 

" Samuel Salt, who became a Bencher in 1782, rented at No. 2 
Crown Office Row two sets of chambers, in one of which the Lamb 
family dwelt. John Lamb, Lamb's father, who is described as 
a scrivener in Charles's Christ's Hospital application form, was 
Salt's right-hand man, not only in business, but privately, while 
Mrs. Lamb acted as housekeeper and possibly as cook. Samuel Salt 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 297 

played the part of tutelary genius to John Lamb's two sons. It was 
he who arranged for Charles to be nominated for Christ's Hospital 
(by Timothy Yeats) ; probably he was instrumental also in getting 
him in the East India House ; and in all likelihood it was he 
who paved the way for the younger John Lamb's position in the 
South-Sea House. It was also Samuel Salt who gave Charles and 
Mary freedom of his Library [see the reference in the essay on 
" Mackery End " ] : a privilege which, to ourselves, is the most 
important of all. Salt died in February, 1792, and is buried in 
the vault of the Temple Church. He left to John Lamb £500 
in South-Sea stock and a small annual sum, and to Elizabeth 
Lamb £200 in money; but with his death the prosperity of the 
family ceased." — Lucas. 

Samite. Pythagoras (582-500 e.g.), born in Samos, was a Greek 
philosopher who is remembered chiefly because he taught the 
transmigration of souls, the music of the heavenly bodies whirling 
in space, and who bound his students to silence until they had 
listened to his lectures for five years. 

San Benito. The yellow robe worn by those who were to suffer 
at an auto da fe. On the garment were pictured figures of 
hideous devils. The name is derived from the garments worn by 
members of the order of St. Benedict. 

Sardonic. Supposed to be derived from the herha Sardonia, a plant 
of Sardinia, which is said, when eaten, to produce convulsive 
motions of the cheeks and lips as in laughter ; hence the meaning, 
a forced, heartless laugh. 

Saturnine. Under the influence of the planet Saturn ; dull, gloomy^ 
phlegmatic. 

Sawbridge, John (1732-1795). Lord Mayor of London in 1775. 

Scamander. The fire-god Hephaistos, the Vulcan of the Romans, was 
sent by Jove to assist Achilles, the hero of the Iliad, who was 
threatened with destruction by the rising river. 

"And the strong River burned, and spake and called to him by 
name, ' Hephaistos, there is no god can match with thee, nor will I 
fight thee thus ablaze with fire.' " — Iliad, Book XXI, Lang, Leaf, 
and Myers's translation. 

Scapula. Author, philologist, and lexicographer of the sixteenth cen- 
tury. He was the compiler of a Greek lexicon. A " tall Scapula " 
refers to Scapula's lexicon with the leaves left untrimmed — a de- 
sideratum in the eyes of bibliophiles. 

Second of September. " The cruel sports of cock-throwing (i.e. throw- 
ing sticks at a cock tied to a stake) and cock-fighting were particu- 
larly connected with Shrove Tuesday, so that cock-broth is a 
natural offering for Shrove Tuesday to make. Boiled hen, with 
bacon, is mentioned as a dish eaten on this day. The Second of 
September returns the courtesy by offering pheasant, shot the day 



298 EXPLANATORY INDEX 

before. At the present day pheasant shooting does not begin till 
October 1, though dates have varied at different periods and in 
different counties. It is quite possible that Lamb, who was no 
sportsman, confused the dates of the commencement of partridge 
and pheasant shooting, respectively. The former begins Septem- 
ber 1." — Note by Hallward. 

Selden, John (1584r-1654) . A learned lawyer, theologian, and antiqua- 
rian. He was a member of Parliament from Oxford, and afterwards 
became Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He had quarters in 
the Inner Temple. 

Septuagesima, Old Madame. The third Sunday before Lent ; so called 
because it is seventy days before Easter. 

Seraphic Doctor. The Italian divine, St. Bonaventura, bishop of 
Albano, in the thirteenth century, was called Doctor Seraphicus 
for his seraphic fervor and eloquence. 

Seven Dials. This locality, like Hog Lane, was notorious for its pov- 
erty and crimes. It took its name from a column which formerly 
stood at the meeting of seven streets and which bore a sun-dial 
facing each of the seven streets. 

Sewell, William (1650-1725). Author of History of the Rise, Increase^ 
and Progress of the Christian People called Quakers, 1722. 

Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671- 
1713), was a moral philosopher and author of Characteristics of 
Men, Manner, Opinions, and Times. "It is an ordinary criticism 
that my Lord Shaftesbury and Sir William Temple are models of 
the genteel style in writing." — Lamb's essay "On the Genteel 
Style in Writing." 

Shakespeare gallery engravings. The Shakespeare gallery of John 
Boydell, an engraver, publisher, and Lord Mayor of London. The 
gallery was a series of prints illustrative of Shakespeare, after 
pictures painted for Boydell by eminent English artists. Boydell 
exhibited the pictures in his own gallery in Pall Mall, and in 1802 
published his edition of Shakespeare with the illustrations. 

Shallow, Master. A character in Henry IV. His weak-minded quality 
is suggested in his name. 

Sharpe, Granville. Author of Remarks on the Uses of the Definite Arti- 
cle " i/ie" in the Greek Testament. 

"She . . . Pope." Mrs.Novello. (In the essay, "A Chapter on Ears.") 

Shelburne, Earl of (1737-1805). William Petty. As prime minister he 
r?cognized the independence of the American colonies. 

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751-1816). Abrilliant wit ; an excellent 
dramatist; a notable orator. His life was marked by intemper- 
ance, improvidence, and debt. He is remembered for his famous 
plays, The Rivals, The School for Scandal, and The Critic. 

Shibboleth. A secret password. The story of the word is in Judges 
xii. 5-6. The Ephraimites betrayed themselves to their enemies 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 299 

the Gileadites thus: " Then said they unto him, Say now Shibbo- 
leth : and he said Sibholeth : for he could not frame to pronounce 
it right." 

Shilling Ones. Banyan's phrase, meaning the spirits of the blessed. 

£hrove Tuesday. Confession-time ; the day immediately preceding 
Ash Wednesday. It used to be a custom to throw sticks and stones 
at cocks on this day. Easter Day and Shrove Tuesday are " Mov- 
ables," because they vary from year to year. 

Sizar. A sizar was a student at Cambridge who originally was permitted 
to eat at the public table at the college without expense, but in 
return for the gift he was expected to do some menial service, prin- 
cipally that of waiting on the table and distributing the " sizes " 
(the daily rations, or "commons" as they are now called). A 
servitor performed a similar duty at Oxford. 

Size Ace. " Six and one, a throw of the dice which is generally a lucky 
one at the game of backgammon. The old names for the points on 
the dice, taken from the French, were ace, deuce, trey, quatre or 
quater, cinque, and sice or size (meaning, respectively, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 
and 6)." 

Smith, Adam (1723-1790). Founder of modern political science ; author 
of The Wealth of Nations. 

Smollett, Tobias (1721-1771). A novelist born in Dumbartonshire; the 
author of Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphrey 
Clinker. "Rory" was the nickname of Roderick Random. 
Smollett also continued the History of England by David Hume 
(1711-1776), another Scotchman. 

Snow Hill. The old route from Holborn Bridge to Newgate, superseded 
by Skinner Street in 1802. Skinner Street, too, disappeared in 
1867, when the Holborn Viaduct was built. 

Sosia. From Plautus's Amphitryon. In the Latin play Mercury as- 
sumes the form of Sosia, the slave of Amphitryon, and Jupiter the 
form of Amphitryon. Out of this situation arises a complication 
of mistaken identity and a comedy of errors. 

South-Sea Bubble (" that famous Bubble"). The story of the failure 
of the South-Sea Company in 1720 is one of the most interesting 
stories of bankruptcy in the history of finance. In the early part 
of the eighteenth century England went mad over stock companies 
which promised quick retui'ns and great wealth to investors. 
Among these the South-Sea Company promised the most and did 
the least. Stock in the Company went as high as 1000 per cent. 
Very naturally the bubble burst. Some attempt was made to 
reimburse the sufferers, — many of whom were simple folks, — 
but it was a long time before England recovered from the 
blow. 

South-Sea House. The South-Sea Company was incorporated in 1710. 
The House was the headquarters of the Company ; now it is en- 



300 EXPLANATORY INDEX 

tirely remodeled, and is "a nest of alien offices." It is situated 
on Tlireadneedle Street, near the Bank of England. 

Spa. The name of a famous watering place in Belgium; now used as 
a generic term for many different watering places. 

Spenser, Edmund (1552-1599) . The greatest non-dramatic poet of the 
Elizabethan age, and one of the greatest English poets of all time ; 
author of The Shepherd's Calendar, Amoretti, and The Faerie 
Queene. The last poem tells of six knights who set out from the 
court of Gloriana, the Queen of England, to battle for the virtues, 
Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy. 

Stackhouse, Thomas (1681-1752). Author of a history of the Bible, 
1727. 

Steele, Sir Eichard (1672-1729) . An English essayist. With Addison 
he founded the Tatler and the Spectator. His life, however, did not 
agree at all points with his fine maxims, for he was a spendthrift, 
somewhat dissolute, and dependent for help on others, but he was 
kind and generous to a fault. 

Sterne, Laurence (171:^1768). An English clergyman whose life and 
works are marked by ill-regulation and an exaltation of whim. 
His chief work, Tristram Shandy, is, by courtesy, called a novel, 
but it has no plan, no coherent story; it is without beginning, 
progress, or end. The book is famous because Sterne has the power 
of imparting genuine human quality to his characters, eccentric 
as they are. Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim are among the most 
vital creations in English literature. The Sentimental Journey, 
the result of a year spent in southern France, is Sterne's other im- 
portant work. 

Stevens, Lancelot Pepys. Rightly spelled Stephens ; he became Un- 
der Grammar Master at Christ's Hospital. 

Stonehenge. A circle of immense stones standing in Salisbury Plains, 
Wiltshire. These stones, seventeen in number, are, in their present 
state, partly connected by cross-slabs on their tops. The origin 
and purpose of the monument is not definitely known. Some 
scholars connect its origin with the Druids, who were the priests 
among the early Celtic tribes ; others think it originated with the 
Anglo-Saxons. 

Swan-like. Ending in sweet music. " This is an allusion to the super- 
stition, encouraged by poets, that dying swans utter wildly beauti- 
ful music." Cf. The Merchant of Venice, III. 1. 44, "He makes a 
swan-like end, fading in music." 

Sweet Breasts. Musical voices, i.e. sweet-voiced. Cf. Two Gentlemen 
of Verona, II. 3. 20, " The fool has an excellent breast." 

Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745). The greatest prose satirist in English 
litei-ature. He was celebrated in church, political, and literary 
affairs. " His great genius was employed chiefly in a battle 
against the hard conditions of this life, against the dishonesty and 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 301 

selfishness of the society amid which he moved, and against the 
political opponents that he hated." "With his social instincts 
ungratified, his ambitions thwarted, his affections starved, he lived 
in constantly failing health for years, until insanity clouded his 
brain, and a lethargy which had for two years held his body inac- 
tive finally culminated in death," — A. P. Walker. His verse is 
" splendidly direct, vivid, and vigorous," but often indelicate and 
malodorous. 

Switzer-like. Gigantic, enormous. The Swiss Guards, famous as mer- 
cenary troops in French wars and as the bodyguard of the Pope, 
are of great stature. 

Sydney (Sidney), Sir Philip (1554-1586). The courtier, scholar, soldier, 
and writer; author of Apologie for Poesie and Arcadia. 

Sylvanus. See Pan. 

T , Marmaduke. Thompson. 

T. E. The Reverend Arthur William Trollope, Master of the Upper 
Grammar School at Christ's Hospital from 1799 to 1826. 

T. H. Thornton Hunt, the eldest son of Leigh Hunt. 

Tabor, Mount. A mountain east of Nazareth where, according to tra- 
dition, the transfiguration of Christ took place. Cf. Matt. xvii. 1, 2. 

Tame, Thomas. A deputy-cashier in the South-Sea House in 1793. 

Tantalus. Tantalus betrayed the secrets of the gods, who punished 
him severely. 

"There was Tantalus, who stood in a pool, his chin level with 
the water, yet he was parched with thirst, and found nothing to 
assuage it ; for when he bowed his hoary head, eager to quaff, the 
water fled away, leaving the ground at his feet all dry. Tall trees, 
laden with fruit, stooped their heads to him, pears, pomegranates, 
apples, and luscious figs ; but when with a sudden grasp he tried to 
seize them, winds whirled them high above his reach." — Gayley's 
Classic Myths. 

Tartarus. The Greek hell ; the place of torture for the condemned. 

Taylor, Bishop Jeremy (1613-1667). Author of Holy Living and Holy 
Dying. 

Temple. Once the seat of the Knights Templars, a military and reli- 
gious order, founded in the Middle Ages for the purpose of protect- 
ing pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land. The history of the 
Temple itself has been varied and interesting. From the Templars 
it passed into the hands of the crown ; thence to the Knights Hos- 
pitalers of St. John, who leased it to the students of the common 
law; and now it is occupied by the Inns of Court, called the Inner 
and Middle Temples, occupied by lawyers. The Inner Temple was 
so termed because it was within the old city of London ; the Middle 
Temple was between the Inner and the Outer ; and the Outer Tem- 
ple, which was not leased to the lawyers, was eventually converted 



302 EXPLANATORY INDEX 

into Exeter Buildings, and lost its ancient name. Not least inter- 
esting in the history of the Temple buildings is the association of 
the place with noted names in English literature. Dr. Johnson, 
Goldsmith, Henry Hallam, Arthur Hallam, Tennyson, Ben Jonson, 
Dryden, Defoe, Spenser, Fielding, Thackeray, and Lamb — among 
others — have lived in the Tenaple buildings or have had close 
association with them. Lamb's own connection with the Temple 
was almost continuous until 1817. 

A map of the Temple shows that it has many lanes such as Mid- 
dle Temple Lane, Inner Temple Lane, Crown 0£fice Row (where 
Lamb was born) ; many buildings such as Middle Temple Hall, 
Inner Temple Hall, Harcourt Buildings, Paper Buildings, and Lin- 
coln's Inn; and many courts such as Pump Court, Hare Court, and 
Fountain Court, where the Elizabethan Hall is, and the fountain 
which Lamb mentions (but with *' the old mysterious mechanism 
gone"), and the old sun-dials with their "moral inscriptions." 
Among the inscriptions still remaining are : Pereunt et imputantur, 
"■ The hours slip away and are reckoned against us " ; in Middle 
Temple Lane; Ex hoc momento pendet seternitas "On this mo- 
ment hangs eternity." 

Terence (193-159 b.c). Publius Terentius Afer, a Roman comedian. 

Tester. An Old French and an Old English coin, valued at about six- 
pence. 

Th . The Right Hon. Sir Edward Thornton, third wrangler at Cam- 
bridge in 1789, envoy to Denmark, and minister to Portugal. 

Thirtieth of January. Charles the First was beheaded on that date, 
1649; and, very suggestively, his enemies used to eat calf's head 
on that day. 

Thomson, James (1700-1748). The author of The Seasons and The 
Castle of Indolence. Although Thomson was born in Scotland, he 
did not write in the Scotch dialect. By his descriptions of natural 
scenery, he played an important part in the romantic return to 
nature in the middle eighteenth-century literature. 

Tibbs. Ned Tibbs, or Beau Tibbs, in Goldsmith's A Citizen of the 
World. Waucope furnishes the following interesting note: "He 
imagined his garret to be the choicest spot in London, and all the 
people of fashion to be his familiar acquaintances." 

Tierce — quatorze. "French card terms used at piquet, signifying a 
sequence of three or four cards of the same suit, as king, queen, 
knave, or 10, 9, 8, 7." — Hallward and Hill. 

Timon. A typical hater of mankind, in Shakespeare's Titnon of 
Athens. Flavins is the honest, faithful servant of Timon. 

Tipp, John. An accountant in the South-Sea House from about 1792. 
Johu Lamb, Charles's brother, succeeded Tipp as deputy-account- 
ant about 1806. 

Tishbite. The prophet Elijah, who was providentially fed by the 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 303 

ravens. Cf. 1 Kings xvii, and Paradise Regained, II. 266- 
270. 

Titan. The Titans were tlie eartli-born giant children of Uranus 
(heaven) and Gsea (earth) who made warfare against the deities 
of Olympus. 

Tobin, James Webbe (d. 1814). A lawyer ; " one of a family of West 
Indian planters, who had an estate in the island of Nevis." 

Tobin, John (1770-1804) . A dramatist. His Life was published in 1820. 
The " Poor Tobin " to whom Lamb refers in "Detached Thoughts " 
may have been James Tobin, John's brother. 

Tooke, John Home (1726-1812) . The assumed name of John Home, an 
English politician, philosopher, and philologist. In his The Diver- 
sions of Purley, he maintained that all words came originally 
" from the objects of external perception." 

Tradrille. A game of cards for three persons. 

Triple Tiara. Triple crown ; the three crowns which surrounded the 
pointed, cylindrical head-dress of the Pope. 

Tritons. Sea-gods; half men, half fishes. 

Trophonius. An oracle in a cave in Boeotia, in Greece. Whoever went 
to consult the oracle was dragged into the cave feet foremost, and 
having heard the message of the oracle, always returned depressed 
in spirit and bearing. Hence arose the proverb, " He has visited 
the cave of Trophonius." 

Twelfth Day. The twelfth day after Christmas ; the festival of the 
Epiphany or manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles. 

Twelfth of August. The date which was kept as the birthday of King 
George IV while he was Prince of Wales. On the Prince's acces- 
sion to the throne, the date was changed to April 23, suggesting 
St. George and Shakespeare ! 

Twenty-ninth of May. Loyal followers of Charles II celebrated his 
birthday by wearing sprigs of oak in commemoration of the oak 
tree which Charles climbed at Boscobel, thus saving his life. The 
day is called Oak- Apple Day. 

Twickenham. A pleasant place up the river Thames, where Pope had 
his home. 

Twickenham Naiades. Twickenham, now a part of London, was 
formerly a suburb of the city. As it was in the country about 
twelve miles from London, it could be fancifully described as the 
abiding place of the naiades, classical nymphs who presided over 
the fountains and brooks. 
Twopenny, Richard (1728-1809). A stockbroker to the Bank of Eng- 
land. He was never a Bencher. 

Tllulantes. The howling ones. " Hence [Tartarus] are clearly heard 
groanings and the sound of the cruel scourge." — Vergil's yEneid, 
VI. 557. 



304 EXPLANATORY INDEX 

Ulysses. The hero of Homer's Odyssey, the Greek form of the name 
being Odysseus. According to Homer, Ulysses stopped the ears of 
his sailors with wax and caused himself to be bound to a mast 
while the ship was passing the island of the Sirens, so that they 
should not be tempted to land and thus be led astray. 

Urban' s obituary. Sylvanus Urban was the pseudonym of the editor 
of the Gentleman' s Magazine. 

Ursula. The name of the pig woman in Jonson's play Bartholomeio 
Fair. Lamb evidently saw a connection between the greasy dame 
and the expression "a Bartholomew pig," meaning a very fat 
person. At the fair " one of the chief attractions used to be a pig, 
roasted whole and served piping hot." 

Usher, James (1580-1656) . An archbishop in the Church of England in 
Ireland. He is principa,lly remembered as the author of a work 
on biblical chronology. 

Utopian Rabelsesian Christians. Utopian is derived from Sir Thomas 
More's imaginary commonwealth, Utopia, a word meaning "no- 
where." Rabelsesian, derived from Rabelais (q.v.), the French sati- 
rist, means free, easy, satirical. Hence the expression is satirical; 
such Christians would be satirical about present conditions. 

Valentine, Bishop. Valentine was not a bishop, but a Christian 
martyr of the time of the Roman emperor Claudius, about a.d. 
270. He was put to death by Claudius, February 14, 270, for be- 
friending the Christians, and ultimately was made a Saint. Lucas 
says, " When raised to the Calendar he was given the day preced- 
ing that formerly kept during the Lupercalia as the festival of 
Februta-Juno, goddess of fruitfulness, on which day, February 15, 
the Roman youths had the custom of drawing the names of girls. 
Hence his association with Love." There is, of course, no connec- 
tion between the Saint and the sending of love missives. 

Vandykes (" those clear Vandykes"). Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599- 
1641) was a Flemish portrait painter who became the Court painter 
of Charles I. His portraits "Baby Stuart" and "Charles I" are 
universally popular. 

Vaux. Guido Vaux or Guy Fawkes, with other conspirators, plotted 
to blow up the Houses of Parliament on November 5, 1605. 

" Venus lulled Ascanius." The story is told in the .^neicl, I. 643-722. 
Ascanius, the son of Venus and JLneas, was kept by Venus, who 
sent Ciipid in the disguise of Ascanius to entice Dido to fall in 
love with J^neas. 

Verdant carpet. The green baize cloth which covers professional card- 
tables. 

Verrio. A sixteenth-century Italian artist. He painted a large picture, 
now hanging in the hall of Christ's Hospital, representing James II 
receiving the mathematical pupils of the school. 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 305 

Vicar of Wakefield (1766). A novel by Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774). 

Vigils. The days preceding church festivals. 

Viola. In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Viola is shipwrecked on the 
coast of Illyria. 

Virgil. The Roman poet Puhlius Vergilius Maro was born October 15, 
B.C. 70, at Andes, near Mantua, Italy, and died September 21, 
B.C. 19. His tomb is pointed out to visitors at Naples. His chief 
works are the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the ^neid. 

ti Virgilian fowl." See Celseno. 

Vittoria Corombona (or The White Devil). A tragedy by John Web- 
ster, published in 1612. It is not known when Webster was born, 
when he died, or how he spent his life. The White Devil as a 
story is repellent ; it arouses no tenderness of feeling ; it is all a 
tissue of evil things, brilliantly, dazzlingly evil; but it deals 
strongly and effectively with situations. 

Vivares, Francois (1709-1780). A French engraver and painter who 
settled in England in 1727, and became one of the leaders of land- 
scape engraving. He worked for John Boydell, who published 
an exceptionally fine set of Shakespeare. Vivares's engravings 
of Claude's landscapes are said to be particularly fine. 

W ("Poor"). This refers to Favel (See F ), according to 

Lamb's key, where he has written: "Favel left Cambridge, be- 
cause he was ashamed of his father, who was a house-painter 
there." Ainger notes that Favel was a Grecian in Christ's Hos- 
pital in Lamb's time, and that Favel obtained a commission in 
the army from the Duke of York. 

W ("squinting"). Has not been identified. Referred to in the 

essay " Christ's Hospital." ( 

W r. Miss. Sally Winter is the name given in Lamb's key, and 

that is all we know about her. 

W s. In "Blakesmoor in H— shire" Lamb thus disguises the 

name of the Plumer family. "Robert Ward did not marry 
William Plumer's widow till four years after this essay was 
printed." — Lucas. 

Walton, Izaak. See Complete Angler. 

Watchet-weeds. Blue clothes. Watchet means blue. 

Weatherall, Will. Not identifiable. 

Wesley, John (1703-1791) . The founder of the sect called Methodists. 

Westminster. A part of London, chiefly renowned for the great 
Abbey, a church founded in 1269 and enlarged from time to time. 
It is the burial place of many of England's great men. In the 
south transept is the Poets' Corner, where are the tombs and 
memorials of eminent men of letters. 

Westminster Hall. Formerly a part of the palace of Westminster, 
but now it serves as an entrance to tbe House of Parliament. 



306 EXPLANATORY INDEX 

Westward Ho ! A cry of the boatmen on the Thames in the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries, when the Thames River was a highway 
of travel, to indicate the direction the boat was going — i.e. to the 
West End of London, the quarter of the city where pleasure was 
chiefly to be found. 

Wharey, John. Became a Bencher in 1801, died 1812. 

Whist. A game of cards played by four persons. Good players of 
whist remember every card that has been played, when played, by 
whom, and what the "lead" or "pass" or "trump" indicates. 
" Sick" -whist is jnquet. Hence Mrs. Battle's love forthe " rigorsof 
the game." Many complications may arise in this really diificult 
mental game. 

Whitgift, John (1530 ?-1604) . Archbishop of Canterbury. He, like 
Bishop Bull and Archbishop Parker, was given to severe oversee- 
ing, in the church. 

Whitsun. Whitsunday, or Whitesunday, the seventh Sunday after 
Easter. Whitsunday, or Pentecost, is the time of the Yearly Meet- 
ing, as it is called, of the Quakers. In the early church times, the 
newly baptized wore white from Easter to Pentecost. 

Whittington, Eichard (Dick). He was a wealthy London merchant 
who became Lord Mayor of London ; died 1423. 

Wild, Jonathan. The famous bully and ' ' thief-taker " in Henry Field- 
ing's novel. History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild 
the Great. 

Wilkes, John (1727-1797) . An English politician and editor of the North 
Briton. In No. 45 of his journal he made a particularly outspoken 
and abusive attack on the King, George III, who urgently re- 
quested that Wilkes be tried for libel and sedition. Wilkes was 
tried and liberated and, notwithstanding his reckless, profligate 
life and scandalous writings, became a great popular hero. 

Wilkins, Peter. The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, by 
Robert Paltock, 1751. This not unpleasant and readable romance, 
written after the manner of GnUiver's Travels, tells how the hero 
is shipwrecked upon an island inhabited by flying men and women. 

Witch (" raising up Samuel"). The witch of Endor, who, at the solici- 
tation of Saul the King of Israel, raised up the spirit of Samuel. 
1 Samuel xvii. 

Wither, George (1588-1667) . A pastoral poet. He continued the pas- 
toral tradition as exemplified by Spenser ; breathing into his con- 
ventional pastoral verse a sincere feeling for nature and a certain 
amount of gentle moralizing. Lamb wrote an essay entitled " On 
the Poetical Works of George Wither." Swinburne has a delight- 
ful essay on " Charles Lamb and George Wither." 

Woolet, William (1735-1785) . One of the earliest and best of the land- 
scape engravers in England. 

Woolman, John (1720-1772). An American Quaker, who, in order to 



EXPLANATORY INDEX 307 

pursue his itinerant missions, became a tailor. While on a trip to 
England in 1772, he died at York. " He died leaving behind him a 
reputation for simple-hearted and single-minded piety and benevo- 
lence that can hardly be equaled and cannot be excelled in the 
annals of our race." — Trent. Lamb refers to Woolman's A Jour- 
nal of the Life, Gospel Labors, and Christian Experiences of that 
Faithful Minister of Jesus Christ— John Woolman, 1795. Whit- 
tier, who edited the Journal, declared that the reader of Woolman 
becomes sensible " of a sweetness as of violets." 

Worthington, Brighton, Eastbourn, Hastings. Seaside resorts on 
the English Channel. 

Wrench, Benjamin (1778-1848). A brilliant English comedian. 

Xenophon. A Greek writer. Author of the Anabasis and the Memo- 
rabilia. 

Yorick. A character in Sterne's Tristram Shandy — hence the adjec- 
tive "Shandean," meaning the nice distinctions made of a 
character compounded in delicate proportions of good and evil. 
Yorick, in the novel, claims descent from Yorick, the jester in 
Shakespeare's Hamlet. 

Zimmerman, Johann Georg von (1728-1795). A Swiss physician at 
the court of George III in Hanover, and later at the court of 
Frederick the Great. His book On Solitude (1755) was a very 
popular book throughout Europe for many years. 



SUGGESTIONS AND QUESTIONS FOR 

STUDY 



The South-Sea House 

How does the second paragraph create the atmosphere of the burst 
bubble ? What attitude does Lamb assume toward the reader ? What 
passages are marked by delicacy of imagination or conception, and by 
lightness of touch ? Observe and explain Lamb's frequent use of the 
dash. What is gained by the use of direct address to the inanimate 
building? As you read the essays, note how often Lamb uses the de- 
vice of direct address and in what kind of language it is coucbed. 
Summarize his humorous portrayal of Evans, Tipp, Tame, and Plumer. 
Are his characterizations merely personal and local ? Have you ever 
known or heard of persons like them? Did Lamb have the "observ- 
ing eye and the portraying hand " — the quality so marked in Shake- 
speare ? Explain how the theme, the memory of some " half-forgotten 
humors of some old clerks defunct," was worth writing about. Why 
should these personal recollections have a general interest? Why 
does Lamb conceive this essay as a song? How has he "fooled the 
reader to the top of his bent " ? Make a list of the unusual words found 
in this essay. 

Oxford in the Vacation 

Explain the use or the force of the dots (. . .) in the third para- 
graph. Explain the figure of speech at the close of the same para- 
graph. Does the essay create the atmosphere of university life, as 
you may imagine it to be? Has the essay a coherent structure? 
Study and discuss the following quotation from Ainger's Charles 
Lamb : "If an essay is headed Oxford in the Vacation, he must not 
complain that only half the paper touches on Oxford and that the rest 
is divided between the writer, Elia, and a certain absent-minded old 
scholar, George Dyer, on whose peculiarities Lamb was never weary 
of dwelling. What, then, is the compensating charm ? What is there 
in tliese rambling and multifarious meditations that proves so stimu- 
lating and suggestive?" Why should Lamb "almost have wept the 
defalcation of Iscariot"? Discuss: "Lamb conferred the patent of 
immortality ... on George Dyer." Why does Lamb rise to an apos- 
trophe in the paragraph beginning "Antiquity" ? Summarize the 
peculiarities of Dyer. Does Lamb's description of Dyer win your 

308 



SUGGESTIONS AND QUESTIONS FOR STUDY 309 

sympathy for Dyer? If possible, you should read Hazlitt's essay " On 
the Look of a Gentleman." Why should Lamb wish Dyer not to 
keep his good resolutions " too rigorously " ? Make a list of the un- 
familiar and unusual words in the essay, and from a study of them 
determine whether more commonly used words would add force to the 
essay. 

Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago 

Have you ever read Dickens's Oliver Twist ? If so, are any incidents 
in the book recalled in your reading of this essay ? Explain how hun- 
ger is the " eldest, strongest of the passions." To what physical sense 
does Lamb appeal in the first part of the essay ? In how many ways 
does he appeal to it ? When and why does Lamb make use of italics ? 
Is Lamb generally given to the use of italics? A disgruntled critic 
once affected to find every kind of bad taste in this essay. What pas- 
sages probably so affected him ? How would you answer his criticism ? 
Ask some physician why " children are universally fat-haters." Does 
this essay appeal to you as founded on actual school-boy knowledge and 
experience ? Is Lamb a suggestive writer ? Does he appeal to your 
imagination? What was Lamb's idea of an education? Do the 
allusions, references, and proper names call up the school atmosphere? 
Why an apostrophe to Coleridge rather than to any other Grecian? 
Why does Lamb drop the Coleridgeian mask in the latter part of the 
essay ? 

The Two Races of Men 

How does Lamb use biblical allusions, references, and classifications 
to heighten his humor ? Is it or is it not in questionable taste to use 
the Bible in this way ? Can you, from this essay, surmise who were 
some of Lamb's favorite authors? What is Lamb's attitude toward 
his characters? Is his humor such as would anger the subject of the 
sketch ? If you have read David Copperfield, you may understand and 
appreciate the following: "Add Captain Jackson [the subject of a 
later essay] to Ralph Bigod (with a touch of Coleridge's grandilo- 
quence) and you have Micawber complete." 

New Year's Eve 

How does this essay prove this statement : " For him [Lamb] the 
unknown might remain unknown ; he rested on the security of fact " ? 
What moods do you detect? What personal elements do you find? 
Is the essay dominated by fact or fiction ? By imagination or reality ? 
To whom will this essay appeal — to young persons or to old persons? 
Have you read Hawthorne's The Sister Years or Tennyson's poem 
•' Ring out the old, ring in the new," In Memoriam, cv? Which note 



310 SUGGESTIONS AND QUESTIONS FOR STUDY 

or mood is the stronger : the love of the past or the fear of the future ? 
Discuss: This essay has "superficial pessimism and agnosticism." 
How has this essay "wistful hesitancies" ? Find sentences which 
appeal to you as striking a deep note of human sympathy and human 
wisdom. What things in life appealed to Lamb ? Read Burns's "Lines 
to a Mouse" to see if there is any trait common to both Burns and 
Lamb. Lamb was a great lover of Burns and of Burns's poetry. How 
does Lamb keep the balance between hope and despair? Lamb him- 
self has been called " the very Janus " in writing this essay: explain. 
Read Coleridge's " Ode to the Departing Year." 



Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist 

How does Lamb create the atmosphere of a contest in the second 
paragraph? Why should Pope be Mrs. Battle's favorite author? 
Leigh Hunt reports that Lamb, on being questioned about his liking 
Pope, said: " Not like Pope! My dear sir, you must be under a mis- 
take — I can read him over and over forever." Read the explanations 
of " Ombre " and " Quadrille " in the Index, and tell why Mrs. Battle 
liked the games. Write a character sketch of Mrs. Battle. Why 
should she dislike chess ? Explain : ' ' Sarah Battle was a gentle- 
woman born." 

A Chapter on Ears 

Explain : " I ever think that sentimentally I am disposed to har- 
mony. But organically I am incapable of a tune." Explain the 
sentence beginning "But a grace," etc. What comparisons, what 
metaphors, does Lamb use to heighten his exposition of his deficiency ? 
Discuss the structure of the last paragraph. Explain the almost 
reckless relation of the clauses. Can you conjecture what kind of 
music Lamb would enjoy? ("Barron Field, in some biographical 
notes written in 1835, says that he loved certain beautiful airs, notably 
Kent's ' O that I had wings like a dove,' and Handel's ' From mighty 
kings.' " — Lucas.) 

A Quakers' Meeting 

Is Lamb's sympathy for the Quakers of a spiritual or of an intellec- 
tual nature? Why did Lamb care for Woolman's Journal? What 
traits of Lamb do you find in this essay that you have not discovered 
before? Is this essay as " bookish " as the essays you have read so 
far ? Whence did Lamb derive the material for the essay ? What 
qualities in the Quaker does Lamb admire? What literary devices 
has Lamb used to gain clearness ? Force ? Emphasis ? 



SUGGESTIONS AND QUESTIONS FOR STUDY 311 



Imperfect Sympathies 

Explain the purpose of the quotation at the head of the essay. Is 
there any similarity in the beginning of this essay and the general 
course of thought in " New Year's Eve " ? In what does the " fine 
observation," of which Canon Ainger speaks, consist? Does Lamb's 
criticism of the Scotch lack sympathy? What is Lamb's particular 
antipathy against Scotchmen? Does Lamb draw up " an indictment 
against a whole people "? Do you get a definite, concrete image of 
Lamb's Scotchman? Show how Lamb treats with delicacy his preju- 
dices or imperfect sympathies. Is Lamb's list — Scotchmen, Jews, 
and Quakers — a list that would find a ready echo in the hearts of 
Englishmen in general, or is it a mere personal list of Lamb's preju- 
dices? How does this essay reveal Lamb's self-reflection? His un- 
selfish egotism? Discuss: "If he was intolerant of anything, it was 
of intolerance." As a final study of this essay, explain what Lamb 
meant by " imperfect sympathies." 

Witches and Other Night Fears 

How does Lamb strike the note of sincerity ? Does he arouse a sense 
of fear and weirdness in you? Why should the witches be a "night 
fear"? Does this essay impress you as being drawn from actual 
experience or from the imagination ? Have you experienced or imagined 
similar fears ? Would you call Lamb's fears fantastic? Morbid? Natu- 
ral? Is the cause for the fears adequately explained? How does this 
essay reveal Lamb's tenacious memory ? How does it reveal his sus- 
ceptible spirit ? Is there an element of pathos in the essay ? Is there 
the usual amount of humor ? Find examples of short, emphatic sen- 
tences. From what authors does he draw his quotations? Are his 
quotations apt or forced ? 

Valentine's Day 

What is the theme of this essay ? What gives unity to the essay ? 
Does the essay lack dignity? Which paragraph has the most 
humor? What gives the paragraph a humorous tone? How does 
Lamb draw on our general experience to heighten the effect in the 
third paragraph? How does the essay maintain an undertone of a 
semi-religious nature ? Why ? How does Lamb draw on his personal 
recollections? What is the literary effect of so many classical allu- 
sions ? Explain : " Bishop Valentine and his true church." 

My Relations 

You should read, at this time, Ainger's Charles Lamb, Chapter II. 
Does the essay reveal resemblances or differences among the various 



312 SUGGESTIONS AND QUESTIONS FOR STUDY 

members of the family? What are the chief characteristics of the 
several members? Are the portraits vivid? Is the close of the first 
paragraph humorous? Explain the suggestiveness of the last sen- 
tence of the first paragraph. How does Lamb mingle fact and fiction 
in the second paragraph? What is Lamb's attitude toward James 
Elia? How was James Elia " a mixture of a man of the world, dilet- 
tante, and sentimentalist"? What personal qualities of Lamb are 
directly or indirectly shown in this essay ? From this essay, and from 
other essays by Lamb, particularly " Oxford in the Vacation," what 
kind of persons, do you think, appealed to Lamb ? Do you find any 
note of irony in the essay? Why should these descriptions of particu- 
lar persons, relatives of Lamb, be of general interest? 

Mackery End in Hertfordshire 

How does the opening paragraph strike the keynote of the essay ? 
In what is Lamb most interested in this essay? In what does the 
"almost unique beauty of this prose idyll" consist? Why call this 
essay a "prose idyll"? Wherein does Lamb show keen insight? 
Humor ? How do you account for such a long preamble about Bridget 
Elia before the account of the excursion into Hertfordshire. begins? 
How is unity secured in the essay? An English critic of this essay 
calls it "beautiful"; discuss the term. Does this essay substantiate 
Wordsworth's assertion that Lamb was a " scorner of the fields " ? You 
should read the story of another brother and sister who were mutually 
loving and helpful — the story of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. 
Are there as many literary and classical allusions in this essay as 
usual in Lamb's essays ? 

The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple 

Make a list of unusual words used in the essay, and comment on 
Lamb's vocabulary as revealed in this essay. Discuss, frankly and hon- 
estly, your opinion of this essay. It ranks high in the estimate of 
students of Lamb, but is one of those essays, to use De Quincey's term, 
that may appeal to the " select few." What is Lamb's point of view in 
describing each of the characters? Cite instances in other essays to 
show Lamb's special gifts for describing characters. How does Lamb 
make a suitable background for his character sketches ? Is the back- 
ground always apparent ? Are the characters in contrast ? Do they 
appeal to you as living beings or imaginary creations ? Contrast or 
compare this essay with the essay on the " South-Sea House." 

Grace before Meat 

What is the more liberal, the more generous, idea of grace, which 
Lamb advocates? Do you find an element of pathos in this essay? 



SUGGESTIONS AND QUESTIONS FOR STUDY 313 

Where do you find acute observation or insight? Is Lamb in earnest, 
in a humorous mood, a semi-humorous mood, or playful, in the fourth 
paragraph ? Does Lamb show a spirit of irreverence anywhere in the 
essay ? What is the tone or mood of the first sentence in the essay ? 
What can you say about the personal element, the egotistical element, 
in the essay ? Find some terse or epigrammatic sentences. Does 
Lamb discuss the question of grace in a dispassionate manner ? Would 
you call his view eccentric? Discuss the title. Summarize Lamb's 
ideas on " grace before meat." Is the last part of the closing para- 
graph pertinent to the subject ? 

Dream-Children: a Reverie 

Is the tone or mood similar to the other essays you have read ? What 
was the direct cause of Lamb's writing this essay ? What comparisons 
make one think of childhood and childhood's joys and sorrows ? Why 
did Lamb make this essay one long paragraph ? What is Lamb's opin- 
ion about tampering with the classics of childhood — such as the 
" Children in the Wood " ? Take some modern version of a tale, such 
as "Little Red Riding-Hood," and see if changes have been made by 
squeamish persons. How are unity, completeness, and harmony ob- 
tained in this essay ? Is the sentence structure the same as in the other 
essays ? Analyze some long sentences for unity of thought and struc- 
ture. Note the use of and in the essay. The constant use of and is 
sometimes called a child's fault ; is it a fault in this essay? Dip any- 
where into the King James version of the Bible, and observe the use of 
and. What is the imaginary situation in the essay? Could an artist 
make a picture of the scene ? How would you conceive such a scene ? 
What senses are appealed to in childhood? Is John Lamb's character 
described the same as it was in "Mackery End"? How does Alice 
recall her mother? How many themes which are inseparable from 
life itself are introduced into this essay ? Where else has Lamb spoken 
of quarreling with a relative ? How do you interpret this spirit of 
quarreling ? Is it a humorous touch ? Explain the title and its aux- 
iliary. Is Lamb's method of description suggestive or delineative? 
What classic or biblical idea is suggested at the close ? 

Distant Correspondents 

Do you think Lamb would have been a desirable correspondent? 
Why ? Summarize Lamb's opinion on news, sentiment, and puns. Is 
this essay in the deliberate Elian manner ? How does the fifth para- 
graph show Lamb's manner of relishing a joke ? What use does he 
make of the interrogative sentence? What does the essay gain in 
force, interest, and emphasis by the use of such sentences? Write in 
the form of a letter an answer to this essay. 



314 SUGGESTIONS AND QUESTIONS FOR STUDY 



The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers 

Why should this essay he called " a peculiarly Elian essay " ? How 
is humor marvelously combined with patlaos in tliis essay? Wliere 
does Lamb show his sensitiveness to strong contrasts? Does Lamb 
make too little of the hardships of the " sweeps " ? Where does Lamb 
allow fantastic imagination to play around the subject? To what 
physical senses does he appeal ? How does Lamb, to use Pater's ex- 
pression, show his "simple mother-pity"? What passage is height- 
ened by the use of exalted language? Is such language in keeping 
with the topic? Where does Lamb's lively fancy lead him to wander 
from his theme ? Does the essay appeal to the intellect or to the affec- 
tions? Why call the essay a "study in black"? Note how many 
words, figures, and allusions Lamb devises to describe the soot-begrimed 
urchins. Does Lamb describe persons and scenes by general effect or 
by particulars and details ? 

A Dissertation upon Roast Pig 

Look up the word dissertation and apply the word in its strictest 
meaning to the essay. Does it apply to the opening sentences ? To 
the essay as a whole ? How is the beginning of the essay marked by 
a mock-historic tone? Why should this essay be the most widely 
known of all the essays by Lamb ? Is the essay a good short story ? 
Canon Ainger suggests that the salient feature of the essay is the 
origin of cooking. Why is the present title better than " The Origin of 
Cooking"? Where does Lamb mingle modern practices with ancient 
proceedings? Note the devices Lamb uses to appeal to the sense of 
taste. How does Lamb heighten the effect by an assumed ignorance 
of all the details ? Compare the humor in this essay with the humor in 
other essays of Lamb. 

BlAKESMOOR in H SHIRE 

Justify the unity of thought and structure in the first paragraph. 
Explain the force or purpose of the many short paragraphs. Explain 
the force of the interrogatory sentences. Are the sentiments over- 
drawn? To what emotions does Lamb appeal? Are the scenes of 
childhood likely to be more memorable than the scenes of later life? 
Is the essay rambling in structure ? Does the style impair the vivid 
impressions ? Cite other instances in other essays where Lamb draws 
on past or early experiences and impressions. Why does Lamb make 
so much of heraldic terras ? AVhere does Lamb use parallel structure ? 
What is the purpose of such structure? Note how the close of the 
essay rises into a semi-religious tone. Does it heighten the effect ? 



SUGGESTIONS AND QUESTIONS FOR STUDY 315 

Poor Relations 

Study the opening paragraph as an introductory passage. What 
does it reveal of Lamb's versatility in language? In vocabulary? In 
allusion? Explain the force of the verbs ending in eth. What use 
does Lamb make of parallel structure in the second paragraph ? How 
does he vary the sentence structure and the sentence length in the 
second paragraph? Does he overdo the matter in piling epithet on 
epithet? Do you think he exhausted himself of epithets of description 
in the second paragraph? Is his mood the same at all times in the 
essay? Are his types of poor relations all viewed from the same 
standpoint? Can you visualize the appearance of each character? 
How is force gained by the point of view adopted in describing the last 
character? Note how suspense, held to the very end, secures empha- 
sis. Discuss the structure of the last paragraph in the essay. Com- 
paring the closing sentence of the essay with the opening sentence, 
would you call the unity of the essay a mechanical unity— a unity 
more rhetorical than literary? 

Stage Illusion 

What is Lamb's distinction between stage illusion in the actor and 
the scenical illusion? Apply his theory to some Shakespearean char- 
acter — Shylock, Cassius, or Macbeth. Is Lamb's view the usual view ? 
Interpret the sentence beginning "Macbeth must see the dagger." 
What distinctions does Lamb make between the acting of a comedy 
and of a tragedy ? Why should this essay be called a subtle piece of 
criticism? What does the essay reveal about Lamb's insight and in- 
tellect? Apply Lamb's theory by taking one of Shakespeare's come- 
dies and one of his tragedies and asking yourself with which characters 
you seem to be on more familiar terms. 

Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading 

Is the structure of the essay in accordance with the title — detached ? 
Select sentences in the essays which you think would make good topics 
for discussion or debate. Check the names of authors or titles of 
books which show that Lamb's reading was out of the ordinary course 
of reading. Is Lamb reserved or positive in his opinion of books and 
authors? Discuss Lamb's opinion on newspapers. Would his opinion 
be applicable to the newspapers of to-day? What do Milton and 
Shakespeare gain by being read aloud? 

The Old Margate Hoy 

Do you understand the title? Is it appropriate? Does it arouse 
your interest? Justify the exalted language of the second and third 



316 SUGGESTIONS AND QUESTIONS FOR STUDY 

paragraphs. Why are the comparisons to " that fire-god " and to " an- 
other Ariel" appropriate? The sketch of the lying traveler is inimi- 
tably done. Study the method of characterization of the traveler. 
"What contrast is offered to bring him into relief? What do you know 
of Lamb's character which would make him so sympathetic with both 
the lying traveler and the sick lad? Do you agree with Lamb's argu- 
ment about being disappointed "at the sight of the sea for the first 
time " ? Does Lamb attempt to give a real or an imaginary picture 
of the sea? Why? Justify the parallel structure — the sentences 
beginning with " I" in the paragraph beginning " I love town or coun- 
try. ..." Does Lamb write in a spirit of indignation anywhere in 
this same paragraph ? What personal trait does it reveal in Lamb ? 
Summarize Lamb's impressions in this essay. 

Sanity of True Genius 

What keen distinction does Lamb draw between sanity and mad- 
ness? Find another subtle discrimination in the second paragraph. 
Find other similar indications of Lamb's acuteness at definition. In 
the second paragraph, in the first few sentences, Lamb has in mind 
the first three books of Paradise Lost. It may interest you to know 
that Lamb was a great admirer of Milton, and that he probably 
quotes from Milton's poetry almost as often as he does from Shake- 
speare's poetry. What distinction does Lamb draw between the greater 
wits, like Milton and Shakespeare, and the little wits — such as are 
found in the authors of " Lane's novels " ? Trace the order of argument 
in the essay. Does Lamb offer proof from psychological processes or 
from literary examples? Explain "hidden sanity." Read the first 
speech of Theseus, Act V, scene 1, in A Midsummer-Night's Dream, to 
see if Shakespeare's lines agree with Lamb's discourse. Macaulay in 
his Essay 07i Milton discusses the same topic, and quotes Shakespeare 
to prove that, "Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy 
poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind. . . ." 

Captain Jackson 

What suggestive or stimulative description of Captain Jackson is 
made in the opening paragraph? How is it in keeping with the gen- 
eral outline of his character ? Does Lamb use the method of giving 
many details to portray the character? What use is made of the 
"cheerful suppers" to bring out the traits of the Captain? What 
other essays show Lamb's ability to deal with the pleasures of pov- 
erty? What was the Captain's opinion of himself? Did he deceive 
himself as to his real condition? If you have read Dickens's The 
Cricket on the Hearth, you should compare Caleb with Captain Jack- 
son. Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith has a delightful story. Colonel Carter 



SUGGESTIONS AND QUESTIONS FOR STUDY 317 

of Cartersville, which will interest you, and which will make you 
more interested in Captain Jackson — because you will understand 
him better. How did the Captain put " a handsome face upon indi- 
gent circumstances"? Explain how the Captain had a "strain of 
constitutional philosophy." 

The Superannuated Man 

Study the structure and the force of the periodic sentence used in 
the opening paragraph. What is the peculiar fitness of the simile at 
the close of the second paragraph? What digression is made in the 
third paragraph? Is the digression displeasing? Is the digression 
"in character " with what you know about Lamb — about his love of 
London? According to Lamb, what is necessary in order that a per- 
son may know how to enjoy a holiday? What strong figure of speech 
do you find in the fifth paragraph ? Does Lamb hold to the facts of 
the case in telling of his retirement? Why should he mystify the 
reader by not telling of his actual retirement from the India House ? 
Would a firm have more personality than a great corporation ? Dis- 
cuss the use of the pronoun / in the essay. What moods are prominent 
in the essay? What tense of the verb is used in the essay? Why? 
Outline the course of thought in the essay. 

Barbara S 



Apply Lamb's statement, " I am in no hurry to begin my story," to 
the introduction of the essay. Is he in a hurry ? What is the purpose 
of the introduction? What is the value of the story of Mrs. Porter 
and the scalding tears ? How does Lamb link the rambling parts of 

his essay — his story of little Barbara S ? How often, and why, 

does he mention the fact of Barbara's coming for her Saturday's pay- 
ment? What use does Lamb make of short sentences in this essay? 
What are the salient features of Barbara's character? How are they 
brought out ? Does Lamb enter into the spirit of Barbara's agreement 
with herself about the over-payment ? How does the footnote at the 
close of the essay heighten the effect of the story ? What application 
does Lamb make of the story of Barbara's returning the money ? Do 
you get a whole or a i^artial picture of Barbara ? 

Rejoicings upon the New Year's Coming of Age 

Study the descriptive verbs and the adjectives in this essay. Ex- 
plain: "Doomsday sent word — he might be expected." Why should 
April Fool marshal the guests? Why should March Mamjweathers 
make such a hubbub? (Recall the old saying, "Mad as a March 
hare.") Why should the Quarter Daijs smile at the promise of New 



318 QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW 

Year? What pun is very prominent? If you have not read Haw- 
thorne's 'The Sister Years, you will find it an interesting story for 
comparison with this essay and with " New Year's Eve." 

Old China 

This essay, together with the essay entitled "Mackery End,in Hert- 
fordshire," gives a complete portrait of Mary Lamb. It is well, there- 
fore, to re-read " Mackery End." Has the title anything to do with the 
subject? What is the passing incident that brings up all the old-time 
fancies ? What part of the essay constitutes the introduction ? How is 
the introduction connected with the essay proper? What concrete ele- 
ments are introduced to show the pleasures of poverty? Does Lamb 
use any part of the introductory idea in the essay proper? What use 
of the introductory idea is made in the last paragraph? How does 
the form of the essay — the conversational form — heighten the effect? 
Does Lamb attempt to argue or preach? How is he naively egotistic? 
Discuss: "He seems to have no definite goal." Does Lamb reveal 
any new truth to you? Discuss: " No one has ever with more magic 
power kindled the quieter side of the sympathies of his readers." 



QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW 

What kind of literature appealed to Lamb ? Explain Lamb's humor. 
Why should Lamb be called the " gentle Elia"? Did Lamb, like 
Burns, have intellectual insight and penetration as well as warmth of 
feeling? Illustrate the last question by giving examples or quotations 
from the essays. 

Discuss Lamb's vocabulary : is it wide, unique, accurate, simple, 
affected ? How do you account for his use of uncommon words ? Do 
these unusual words give a flavor to his essays ? Whence does Lamb 
draw many of his quotations and allusions ? Is Lamb always accurate 
in his quotations? When is Lamb apt to Use the device of direct ad- 
dress ? Of apostrophe ? 

Is Lamb a suggestive writer? Does he appeal to your imagination ? 
Does he get into personal touch with his reader? Does Lamb deal 
with the big questions of life ? In what way may Lamb be said to be 
a contributor to personal culture and the conduct of life? Does he 
appeal to one's individual experience or to one's knowledge derived 
from contact with mankind? Discuss : Lamb had a " thinking heart." 
Does he appeal to a limited or to a wide range of moods and experi- 
ences ? 

What essays contain portraits which show Lamb to be a master-hand 
at sketching character? Lamb once said that he preferred "the 



QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR REVIEW 319 

affections to the sciences " ; prove the statement from passages in the 
essays. De Quincey called Lamb a "Diogenes with the heart of a 
St. John." Explain. 

Discuss Lamb's habit of mystifying his readers and his friends. 
Verify De Quincey's statement that Lamb had " a talent for saying 
keen, pointed things, sudden flashes, or revelations of hidden truths, in 
a short condensed form of words." Apply to Lamb, George Eliot's 
statement that " an essayist must be personal, or his hearers can feel 
no manner of interest in him." Is Lamb too egotistical? Was 
Lamb's range of subjects " a contracted one " ? 

It has been said that the skillful essayist " will be recognized as much 
by what he leaves in the inkstand as by what he says." Is this true of 
Lamb? Does Lamb ordinarily make a definite progress in his essays 
or does he merely circle round his theme? Discuss Leigh Hunt's 
statement: "A sensibility to strong contrasts was the foundation of 
his humor." 

Cite instances to show that Lamb " loves to mingle romance with 
reality." Discuss: " Lamb has a certain natural incapacity for being 
accurate, an inveterate turn for the opposite." Prove Lamb's state- 
ment: "I gather myself up into the old things." What does Pater 
mean when he says that Lamb "continually overawes one with 
touches of a strange utterance from afar " ? 

Discuss Talfourd's criticism that of all modern writers Lamb's writ- 
ings " are most immediately directed to give us heart's-ease and make 
us happy." Can you cite passages or essays to substantiate Hood's 
assertion that "Lamb, whilst he willingly lent a crutch to halting 
Humility, took delight in tripping up the stilts of Pretension " ? 

Apply the following adjectives to passages or essays: discursive, 
delicate, keen, quiet, reflective, witty, epigrammatic, amiable, easy, 
graceful, tender, sympathetic, quaint, intellectual, critical, picturesque, 
charming, magical, sarcastic, egotistical, fine, significant, subdued, 
serene, vigorous. 



ADVERTISEMENTS 



AN INTRODUCTION TO THE 

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George Eliot's Silas Marner. Edited by G. A. Wauchope, Professor in the 
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Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield. With introduction and notes by W. H. Hud- 
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Irving '8 Life of Goldsmith. Edited by H. E. Coblentz, South Division High 
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Macaulay's Essay on Milton. Edited by Albert Perry Walker, Master in 
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Macaulay's Essay on Addison. Edited by Albert Perry Walker. Cloth. 
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Macaulay's Life of Johnson. Edited by Albert Perry Walker. Cloth. 122 
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Milton's Paradise Lost. Books i and ii. Edited by Albert Perry Walker. 
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Milton's Minor Poems. Edited by Albert Perry Walker. Cloth. 190 
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Pope's Translation of the Iliad. Books i, vi, xxii, and xxiv. Edited by Paul 
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Scott's Ivanhoe. Edited by Porter Lander MacCltntock. Cloth. 556 pages. 
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Scott's Lady of the Lake. Edited by L. Dupont Syle, Professor in the Uni- 
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Shakespeare. Se.&iht Arden Shakespeare. Per vol., 25 cents. 

Tennyson's Enoch Arden, and the two Locksley Halls. Edited by Calvin S. 
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Tennyspn'B Idylls of the King. Four idylls, edited by Arthur Beattv, Uni- 
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Tennyson's The Princess. With introduction and notes by Andrew J. George. 
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Webster's First Bunker Hill Oration. With introduction and notes by Andrew 
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